Developer: Bohemia Interactive
Publisher: Tencent
Platform: Switch (reviewed), PC, Android, iOS (F2P)
Tested on: Switch
Ylands: Nintendo Switch Edition – Review
No, this one isn’t a backlog review. Ylands may have been out on PC and mobile since 2019, but the Switch port of Bohemia Interactive’s survival game is “new”. This is to the point that it’s even considered an entirely separate edition, as evidenced by the full title. At first glance, the main difference seems to be that the PC and mobile versions of the game are free-to-play with microtransactions, whereas Ylands’ Switch port carries a rather hefty price tag. Of course, if that means you’ll get everything the game has to offer included in a single purchase, this might end up being a decent deal. That is, of course, if the game is worth playing in the first place. Is it?
Story
Whatever semblance of a story there is in Ylands is all crammed into a prologue that doesn’t really explain anything. Things start out deep in an ancient tomb that you need to find your way out of. Upon successfully doing so, a mysterious woman tells you that you’ve taken the first step towards joining CAG, the Classy Adventurers Guild. You’re given little time to process this information because you immediately find yourself in a frozen tundra, riding on the back of a polar bear. Eventually, you’ll end up in a cave where that same woman informs you that you’re officially a guild member. Two months later, you’re sailing on a CAG boat, looking for a lost guild member. However, your ship gets caught in a massive storm and you end up shipwrecked on an island. After this, the story just… fizzles out? Mind you, the entire prologue takes up all but 10 minutes, after which you’re simply left to fend for yourself, leaving us to ask what the point of all this was.
Graphics
We’re sorry if this makes you feel old, but Ylands’ low poly retro graphics are very reminiscent of a Wii game, what with the blurry, grainy visuals -as if the game is running in 480p resolution. That’s right, we just called the Wii retro. Now, we don’t necessarily mind the low poly aesthetic, but even with the game’s simplistic visuals, Ylands’ visual performance is just terrible. The game’s draw distance is atrocious, pop-ins are frequent and even then the game can’t keep up a steady frame rate. Now, it’s common knowledge that the Switch isn’t a visual powerhouse, but if it can run Tears of the Kingdom at a steady 30fps, there really isn’t an excuse for a five-year-old game that is also on mobile platforms to perform this abysmally.
Sound
The soundtrack is probably Ylands’ best feature, although that’s not saying much. The music wouldn’t feel out of place in a low-budget adventure movie. The sound effects are as generic as it gets, and it’s not a surprise that voice actors are nowhere to be found. Still, it didn’t make our ears bleed, so there’s that.
Gameplay
Upon booting up Ylands, you’re greeted with a choice between two main modes for the survival game. There’s the adventure mode, which is the main way to play the game, but there is also a creative mode, which is a sandbox of sorts. Additionally, you’ll find a store option in the game’s main menu, though this is suspiciously empty and likely a remnant of the free-to-play approach of the PC and mobile versions. We’d imagine that this is where the game offers microtransactions. Now, the Switch port isn’t a complete edition of Ylands: there is still plenty of DLC that you can buy from the Switch eShop, but as far as we could tell, any paid add-ons are of the cosmetic kind. We’ll get back to what this entails exactly, but for now, let’s focus on the most important part: Ylands’ gameplay!
The “story” prologue we mentioned earlier acts as the game’s tutorial, which is probably why it’s all over the place. While things feel rushed and unexplained from a story perspective, this approach does give the game a chance to show off the different mechanics. In the tomb, you’re confronted with a key-based puzzle as well as the game’s combat mechanics, and the tundra section gives you a chance to try out the in-game mounts. The shipwreck section showcases the game’s sailing controls. What the prologue also does, however, is set up certain expectations about what Ylands has in store for you, but the game then fails to actually deliver on this. This isn’t a swashbuckling adventure filled with exploration and mystery, but a survival grindfest. Things might become more interesting later on, but we grew bored with Ylands before that happened. We’re not sure whether this is because of the game’s roots as a free-to-play title. Perhaps the other versions of the game adopt a pay-to-win approach that allows you to circumvent grinding. The way it works is that you’ll grind out materials and research blueprints to construct increasingly elaborate contraptions. One of your first goals is to make a boat, for example, which allows you to get off the starting island and sail to another one, where different materials await you.
It doesn’t help that controlling your survivor is a struggle too. Character movement is tedious in itself, and placing items proved to be wildly inaccurate. The in-game interface wasn’t optimized to be navigated with a controller, instead remaining geared towards a mouse and keyboard setup. This did leave us wondering how the game plays on mobile, especially since the Switch version seemingly lacked touchscreen support. That’s without even getting into the lag and slowdown that plagued the few hours that we could stomach the game.
Looking at Ylands’ creative mode, we were left wondering what the point of it was. It’s fun to dabble with what the game offers here for a few minutes, until you realize that the game is an offline single-player experience. There is no way to share your own sandbox creations with the Ylands community -if there is such a thing- or to download the creations of others. That’s a shame because a feature like that could have redeemed a lot of Ylands’ appeal, although if we were Bohemia Interactive, we’d be focusing on actually fixing the game’s plethora of bugs first.
Cycling back to Ylands’ value, we need to look at both the price of the base game as well as the available DLC. The RRP for Ylands is €24.99, and if you’re planning on completing the game and picking up all 10(!) DLC packs, you’re looking at an additional €51,90. That’s a lot of moolah for a game, especially since the DLC only gives you additional pets and cosmetic blueprints. Sure, you’re circumventing the microtransactions that are present in the free-to-play version of the game, but as far as our experience goes; Ylands isn’t a very good game in the first place. We’d be hard-pressed to recommend the base game at RRP, let alone spending twice the cost of the base game on the DLC. There’s nothing here that you won’t find better -or cheaper- elsewhere.
Conclusion
We’re on the fence of whether Ylands on the Switch is a bad port of a mediocre game, or whether Ylands is just a terrible game outright. What we saw here didn’t exactly motivate us to check out the free-to-play versions to compare them to the Switch port. The opening prologue showed some potential, even if it felt disjointed from the main game but everything after those first 10 minutes or so turned out to be an absolute waste of time. From the grindy gameplay loop to the frustrating controls to the terrible visual performance, we advise you to stay far, far away from Ylands.
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