Islanders! Very much an underseen gem of a game when you consider the amount of cozy, pastel, pseudo-wholesome games you can come across in one sitting. Still, its addictive, albeit temperamental gameplay loop is enough to feast on for a while, and that’s in spite of its sneaky scoring mechanics. Seems like UK-based developers Coatsink think so as well, which is why Islanders: New Shores is here to build bridges to new worlds.
In tandem with Thunderful Publishing, Islanders: New Shores ups the ante with new islands and reinforced mechanics. It’s still the same minimalist city builder that became a hit to begin with, but Coatsink and new developer The Station have paid attention to how it all fares in magnification, as opposed to the quick bursts that the original Islanders relished in so thoroughly. The result is a game looking to the future, as a hefty roadmap was published pre-release to show what’s in store for New Shores.
Gameplay is as follows: you are presented with small, deserted islands, and a choice between what is essentially two booster packs. Pick one, and you’re given a handful of resources and buildings you can place around the island, ranging from houses and facilities to nature generation and manipulation. If you’re able to reach a score threshold before you exhaust the booster pack, you unlock another pack, and if you do it enough times on one island, you’re able to travel to the next island to do it over again.
Despite the game saying you can travel to the next island as soon as you reach said threshold, there’s no worthwhile reason to do so. The main objective of the game is to accrue as many points as possible, and there’s no bonus for simply dipping – on the contrary, in fact, as those numbers add up into fairly hefty chunks in the aftermath. It’s also where most of Islanders’ magic is shown off, and in New Shores, that’s only been exemplified even more.
Once the final possible piece is laid down, there’s a chance for the HUD to remove itself, and the game simply orbits around your current island, lights coming on as the day dims, and it soothes. Compared to the original Islanders, New Shores is much warmer and moodier, bringing with it a photo mode which, while heavily restrictive in opportunities present at time of writing, extracts enough of what’s possible in-game.
It’s quite an achievement to let macrocosms hit so thoroughly, but New Shores manages to do it every time, even as the islands get bigger and more robust. While citing inspirations like SimCity and Bad North for the original Islanders release in 2019, part of me believes that 2021’s Loop Hero may have played a hand in how New Shores presents itself.
Early on in your adventure, you’ll have to unlearn the possibility of letting aesthetics and efficiency share the limelight, a harsh lesson that may make or break how you perceive the game’s flow sometimes. Despite many of the pieces in New Shores having the potential to stack into each other like it’s Tetris, a lot of the time, the game will not allow it without wasting precious space.
The other trick you’ll have to learn is how houses and mansions differentiate from each other, as in what is incidentally an ingenious little nugget of class commentary, the two do not intermix well at all. The mansions yearn for diamonds, markets, and monuments, while the houses need distractions, taverns, and circuses. You’ll need to frame this into muscle memory, as in a rather horrific oversight, the game doesn’t present a glossary or index of items and bonuses you can come across.
One could argue that it would impede on Islanders’ minimalist nature as a whole, but New Shores clearly wants to strike bigger and bolder strokes, especially as time goes on in its “Endless” mode. Each new island brings a new biome, that new biome bringing a new building alongside it, as well as potential bonuses to build around. These can range from ancient rocks, which provide hefty point bonuses when broken, to the biome literally rising from the ground with each new point threshold.
With that said, that last prospect of the biome rising from the ground? That has a chance to just kill your run completely. It’s a very, very rare occurrence, but it’s possible for the game to simply not give you the space or choice of resources to move on to the next threshold, which is utterly deflating. Despite the rarity of this anomaly, it’s worth keeping in mind how little Islanders focuses on the next step, instead how it all stands. It’s like the Wallace & Gromit sketch with the train-tracks, only I’m not laughing.
It’s a mechanically mesmerizing experience, even if its pacing and progression lets it down by awkwardly heaving it in front of you. The amount of time you can spend on some of these islands trying fruitlessly to slam buildings into tricky spots like groceries in bags, and knowing that the next island presented is going to double that time in one go. Endless mode, despite those bursts of magic, is an endurance test that will turn your God-given powers into sloppy slaps of building placement that are ruined by fatigue.
The other big miss is the sound design, lacking a real aural achievement to go alongside its little touches. The music never felt like it fit in with whatever you were planning to create, the plodding and plonking of fake glockenspiel and kalimba sticking out like a sore thumb, when the ambience does so much more to add to the aesthetic than it ever could. Plop a few houses down and listen to the bustle, how it dances with the wind, and that’s New Shores right there.
Islanders: New Shores Review | Final Verdict
It’s easy to call Islanders addictive, and New Shores even more so. Coatsink and The Station clearly have what’s necessary to make its mechanics a lock-on for long stretches of mucking about, but this exercise of expertise is hamstrung by the extra weight. As it stands, New Shores is going to move to fresh lands, as the roadmap promises, and honestly, given what’s shown so far? It’s worth it to jump on the boat now. The future’s a bonus.
Islanders: New Shores was reviewed on PC using a copy provided by the publisher over the course of 22 hours of gameplay — all screenshots were taken during the process of review.
