Starsand Island
Cute cosy Farm Sim with Anime style
My Score: 8/10
I genuinely enjoyed playing this game and there are many unique features that make it different but familiar to other Farm Sim type games.
The animal system is good how you can breed rare breeds, but can be frustrating when you get too many male cows or chickens, that don’t make any produce, although at least you have to option to remove animals from the barns and store them for later or sell them for money if you need to make space for other animals.
The crop system is fine, but the tiles tend to dry out too quickly and need constantly watering and the sprinkler system is quite limited until you unlock the sprinklers with the larger range. I like they borrowed the giant crops, such as pumpkins, from other games like Stardew, while doing it in a way that feels new. There are robots that can auto gather your ripe crops, which is useful, but can lead to issue if you are trying to get a giant crop to mutate or flower cross pollination. There is also a greenhouse that allows you to plant out of season crops, but once you have maxed out your planting skill, it allows you to grow out of season crops in normal tiles anyway, so the greenhouse isn’t really needed.
The house building system gives you lots of items, but the core house building can be a bit tricky as if you want to upgrade to a larger house you have to remove all items in the area first, then build the layout for the new house size and replace all your furnishings.
The town is great and has lots of good places and shops. The only thing I would mention is that although you get lots of vehicle options to naviagate the map, most of the larger vehicles like cars are only really useful to use around the outer road as it is not really practical to drive a car through the narrow streets.
It does take a long time to build up enough money to unlock other housing plots like the lake island or the off shore island, but I feel this is expected as it is a long term goal. Although once you have unlocked all the skill tiers and done all of the basic quests, there isn’t really a lot to do from day-to-day other than the same routine of farming, ranching and selling. To be fair, this is also the case for games like Stardew Valley, which requires 10 million gold to unlock the most expensive item in the game, but at least Stardew has other things to do and more festivals. Starsand Island only has two festivals, one in the summer and one in the winter, so more events would be nice, without having to have loads.
The adventure system itself is fine, I like the idea of the cave to explore and different areas of the cave have different types of ores etc. The only real problem is the lack of monsters. There are three bosses blocking your progress and in between there are a few minor enemies, but no real peril. Would be nice to have a much wider variety of mobs to attack as there’s not much point in upgrading your weapons once you have defeated all three bosses. There are sentries, but since enemies don’t sneak up on you while you are gathering, these seem to be completely pointless. Furthermore, you can build robots that gather your ore in the cave, meaning there is no reason to return to the cave once it is fully explored, other than to collect the ore every few days.
Overall the game has a lot of things you can do, but once you have maxed out your craft skills, and fully explore the map, the only thing really to keep you playing is the target of the next housing plot or getting the achievements.
Steam: https://store.steampowered.com/app/2966320/Starsand_Island/
Note: This review will be of the game itself and does not factor in any confusion about the status of the game publisher. I will assume the rumours regarding this game are not true unless proven, in which case I will withdraw this review.
