Lost Islands is an open-world survival game relying on your skills to successfully explore and explore in dangerous terrains.
Lost Islands is a single-player survival game created by the indie studio Glitch. You start out your journey on a small island with only a few supplies to help warm you up to the massive, open world beyond. You’re guided through Lost Island‘s world through a quest system designed to reward and direct you.
Its overall concept is based on surviving an unusual island by gathering resources and discovering better ways to understand the unforgiving map. You are quickly met with a quest system to help you learn and progress at your own pace, but you are not required to follow this and are given complete freedom to play however you please.
Scavenging and collecting resources is fun and the threat of enemies all over the island requires you to think twice and plan around them, especially when you do not have the gear to take them head-on. There are also a variety of other features to make Lost Islands more exciting including horses, boats and the ability to build a fort and protect yourself from the encroaching forest.
For the features of this game, there are many things to keep you enticed to return with loads of features and recipes unlocking as you play through. Tools and weapons upgrade with new resources from wood through to metal, requiring you to gather, refine and adapt. Exploring key locations will often grant you big rewards such as a horse for transport or unlocking the advanced trading system to buy and sell materials, weapons, food and resources. Vehicles such as boats are unlocked later in the game to help you explore at a faster rate — with you taking more and more control over the terrifying world as you master it. Certain locations are also guarded with lots of undead soldiers protecting their loot from anyone who dares take it from them.
However, to contradict this, there are a few small issues that jar the experience: one of them being that the ladders in this game often have issues.
In some cases, you can scale a ladder to explore more areas, but in other cases, you cannot use them at all — this is inconsistent and confusing, as they are not distinguished. A second issue I have with this game is the price: £30 is quite a high price and puts it up against a lot of larger games. You can purchase The Forest, or The Sons of the Forest for less, and these are much more polished games with larger teams maintaining them.
Linking this to my next point, Lost Islands is an open-world survival game but other games dominate this genre already, with some of them being cheaper. Games like The Long Dark are very interesting, adding an added challenge of fighting off the cold while also following a clear story line: The Forest and its sequel are two other options which also boast multiplayer functionality with high-resolution graphics. Lost Islands is a unique take on the genre with its fun graphics and a more arcade style, which makes the game more family-friendly and less intense, especially for younger ages. However, for the vast majority, there are other, more in-depth examples on the market with more content and support which appeal to the audience more and provide them with more content.
To summarise, Lost Islands is a new take on the open-world survival genre with a unique art style to fit it appropriately to create a more fun and light-hearted experience compared to similar games like The Long Dark and The Forest. Although it’s fun it does however cost more than other options in the genre which also have larger development teams and better overall quality. But this game is fun, cheerful and extremely challenging at times making you want to keep playing and explore the massive island and everything it has to offer.
Lost Islands is available now for Windows, Linux and Xbox.
