Islanders: New Shores

ISLANDERS: New Shores is a chill building experience, full of strategy, that requires a lot of planning to maximise your score, but it remains a calm and relaxing experience.

Imagine your perfect island retreat. Perhaps there’s white sandy beaches, possibly lush green forests, or maybe mountainous terrain is more your jam. Now imagine a quaint town, with fountains on every corner and houses built straight into the cliff-face. You head to the harbour to watch the fishing boats and look out to the picturesque horizon. Feel more chilled? Me too.

A relaxing, minimalist and deceptively complex puzzle-style city builder, with surprisingly challenging gameplay if you decide to test yourself against its global leaderboards.

Wonderfully zen and relaxing, Islanders: New Shores is the city building game for people who don't want to get bogged down with nitty-gritty. All you need to worry about here is placing buildings and getting the highest score possible — and if even that sounds too stressful, there's a sandbox mode that simply lets you design your own aesthetically-pleasing townscape.

In 2019, Grizzly Games released the “minimalist city builder” game ISLANDERS, where you slowly build a small civilisation from a procedurally generated island, using the building packs given to you each round. I got this game during the pandemic, and it was a great distraction from the stress of Tom Nook and his cronies, as it offered an alternative to the cozy island-building experience. Now, a sequel called ISLANDERS: New Shores is here, promising familiar gameplay with added elements. ...

Welcome to Islanders: New Shores. Build your island retreat in a calm, minimalist world with exciting new features that keep the classic charm while inspiring fresh creativity. Switch version reviewed. Review copy provided by company for testing purposes.

It's cute in its minimalism, and remedial in its gameplay loop, yet despite promising to find that je ne sais quoi in the future, Islanders: New Shores doesn't have it now.