When I got to preview Starsand Island back in February, while I thought it was a pretty good little farm sim, something about it wasn’t completely grabbing me. Usually, when I feel this way, a change of platform is often the solution—particularly when it’s the Nintendo Switch. Like I said in my old The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim review, approaching a game in a more casual way, like with a handheld, can help you appreciate it in a way you hadn’t before.
So seeing Starsand Island get a Nintendo Switch 2 release genuinely filled me with excitement. Nintendo’s hybrid handheld is the perfect place for farming sims, and being able to sit back with a series or podcast on in the background while starting my new farming life seemed like a hook that playing it on PC lacked. However, I quickly learned this was a falsehood, as this Nintendo Switch 2 version is one of the most slapdash ports I’ve seen…possibly ever.
Before I get into my review, I want to specify that this is exclusive to the Nintendo Switch 2 version of Starsand Island. During my preview time, I didn’t experience any of the issues I experienced within the first minutes of playing this version. If this game is meant to receive a patch, I wouldn’t know—I was not provided that information. All I know is that this is the version Seed Sparkle Lab felt appropriate to send to critics, and it is virtually unplayable.
Furthermore, I want to reiterate a point from my preview: I do think Starsand Island has some good ideas. Its presentation is solid, its characters—albeit somewhat forgettable—are uniquely designed given the game’s aesthetic, and its farming and building fundamentals are solid. Not only that, but the game does have a great cel-shaded aesthetic and a pretty solid soundtrack.
But the Nintendo Switch 2 version is a complete mess of glitches and pathetic performance—one of a magnitude that is unacceptable on a system which can handle Cyberpunk 2077 pretty admirably. I knew there was a problem right from the start when the game seemed to run at roughly 40fps, whereupon I went into the menus and saw there were Quality and Performance graphics settings. After switching to Performance, the resolution was dropped to what looked like 480p, and the frame rate didn’t appear remotely affected.
This carried through when I docked the Nintendo Switch 2 to see if it would make a difference, but no—setting the game to Performance just applied a thick layer of Vaseline to the screen and did little else. From there, it was a cavalcade of glitches that repeatedly impeded the experience, as each one required me to reset the game and sit through four to five minutes of load times before I could play again.
At one point, I entered a part of the map where my character model, safe for my hair and equipped tool, vanished into thin air—reappearing past the initial line of deletion. This happened again after ending the day, only for my character to wake up without a face—this one required a reset. An early quest required me to smelt a copper bar, but for some reason the game decided to just delete the forge I had built, so I needed to craft a new one. Another instance applied NoClip to the floor of my house, making it impossible to interact with my bed and end the day—requiring yet another reset.
On top of all this, Starsand Island is just pathetically optimized for the Nintendo Switch 2. The amount of object pop-in is staggering, becoming especially bad if you’re piloting a vehicle as you crash into fences that failed to materialize. Character models aren’t anchored to the floor, so navigating any slope causes them to clip into the ground. Vehicles are especially bad, unable to adhere to the physics of the floor and oftentimes crashing headfirst into any mild slope.
“Starsand Island is just pathetically optimized for the Nintendo Switch 2. “
Hilariously, one early mission calls for you to craft a skateboard as a form of introducing players to faster forms of travel, and the thing is so bugged out that, as soon as I hopped on it, I started darting in a zig-zag pattern since the thing couldn’t adhere to the ground properly—it also didn’t help that the skateboard model didn’t have wheels. And it just continued from there: characters clipping into the floor, T-posing at random, SFX repeating over each other, or playing long after animations had ended.
Outside of this, a lot of my thoughts from my preview remain. Starsand Island doesn’t really have a distinct personality, at least not enough to be memorable amongst the myriad farming sims that dominate the genre. Starsand Town is both overly large and kind of forgettable, making it somewhat difficult to navigate. Its bachelors/bachelorettes are all pretty generic anime characters—all of whom have the same basic design and default pose and lack any real sense of personality.
And when you take all of this: the lack of identity, the performance issues, the myriad glitches; you get a game that went from simply struggling to develop a hook, to actively ripping that hook from the water before it was anywhere close to a fish. I can’t think of a single reason anyone would play this on a system that has optimized versions of both Stardew Valley or Story of Seasons: Grand Bazaar.
As I said, Starsand Island may be a decent game if played on any other platform, but the Nintendo Switch 2 version is an absolute joke. The game info claims this is version 1.0.036, so if this version is the one being released to the public, I would say stay FAR away from this cursed island until it’s brought up to an acceptable state.
