Islanders: New Shores review – a cosy city builder at a budget price

A city builder crossed with a roguelite puzzler becomes one of the most uniquely relaxing games of the year, and an absolute bargain to boot.

City builder games exist on a broad spectrum. At one end are SimCity and Cities: Skylines, which not only let you manage everything from zoning to taxes, but also have you fiddling about with power lines and sewage treatment plants. At the opposite end is Townscaper, where single taps on your phone screen knock up buildings, bridges, and towers that automatically connect to one another, with no particular goal other than to make something that looks nice.

Not every game in the genre is quite what it appears to be though. Bulwark: Falconeer Chronicles, for example, looked beautiful, and seemed to have serious complexity. It was only when you spent a few hours with it that you realised it wasn’t really a game at all and lacked a coherent framework to make it either skill-based or competitive. Islanders is also deceptive, but in quite a different way.

Released in 2019, the flat textured archipelagos and clear blue seas of the original at first seemed bland and overly simple. It was only when you got to know the game that you realised quite how much was going on under the bonnet, its subtlety and intricacy making itself known as you unlocked more buildings and began to understand the multitude of ways your emergent colonies could be assembled to collect higher scores.

The original Islanders was also a relaxing joy to play, with no timer, an ambient soundtrack, and an atmosphere that encouraged calm tinkering. It’s reassuring to discover that New Shores retains the mechanics and feel of the first game, while harmoniously expanding on them. It adds more buildings, fresh ways to score points, and an improved system of boons – the game’s power-ups – which confer a range of enhancements that temporarily change the way you play. It also looks more impressive.

Starting with a virgin group of small islands, procedurally generated from a selection of biomes, you begin with a pack of buildings to place wherever there’s room. Intuitively, you’ll need to position them to take advantage of terrain, so fishing huts work best near water and breweries are most useful on flat plains, where you can also plant hops.

As before, each building has likes and dislikes that affect the points you score from it. Those fishermen prefer not to be too near seaweed farms, while mansions score most when they’re right next to the city centre, and preferably near other mansions. New Shores also adds the need to consider line of sight.

That means lighthouses are most fruitfully positioned on a high point for maximum uninterrupted views, while the shaman’s hut likes to be confined in the tightest space possible, and ideally not too near any industry. Pyres score most when they’re in view of other pyres, but as far away from each other as possible.

One of the trickiest of the game’s new buildings is the temple, which has a catalogue of preferences, both positive and negative, and starts with a massive negative score. Only by building it in the perfect context can its truly enormous scoring potential be unlocked. Build it too soon, or put it in the wrong place, and it’s game over within minutes.

You’ll be seeing plenty of game overs. Built with a roguelike structure, New Shores’ islands come with a minimum score needed to progress to the next island. Fail to reach it and it’s time to start again, but do well and you can clock the circular scoreboard over and over again before moving on, earning even more towards your eventual total for the round.

Of course, reaching new islands is a large part of that, because more exotic buildings tend to arrive later on. You’ll also need to be judicious in your use of boons, most of which only affect the level you’re on, but some of which can have lasting positive ramifications. That also goes for new building, the aviary, which lets you send a network of carrier pigeons between every group of islands you unlock.

While the moment-to-moment gameplay is perfectly calm, there’s still a consequential permanence to your decisions. You can undo the last placement you made, but you can only remove a single building, making everything up to that point irreversible. It means each construction has to bear in mind the landscape and proximity to other buildings, as well as keeping half an eye on future requirements.

It’s a process that’s hugely compelling, the game’s elegantly designed interface making it pleasing to mess around with the precise arrangement and orientation of buildings – the scores for each automatically appearing as you drag them around the map, disturbing nearby palm fronds as you move them into their final position.

There’s an inherent random factor, your early success powerfully dependent on the pattern of islands you’re presented with. Generally more flat space, especially if it’s near the level’s first statue, which confers bonuses to nearby buildings, can really help. However, that sense of chance, while never eliminated, is balanced by structures you unlock as you progress, and by the fact that each new island comes with a choice of two biomes.

Biomes can make a big difference. Initially anything volcanic is a major disadvantage, with its tendency towards spiky mountains and hexagonal, basalt columns, which make it next to impossible to build farms, or indeed cities, which thrive on buildings being crammed next to one another. Learning how to manage these, and take advantage of the unique buildings that come with them, is just part of New Shores’ surprisingly lengthy learning curve.

Beautiful, gently mentally taxing, and far more involved than it initially appears, New Shores is a puzzle game combined with a roguelike city builder. It’s ideal entertainment for sultry summer evenings and will provide many days of inspired tinkering, all for less than the price of a central London pint.

Formats: PlayStation 5 (reviewed), Nintendo Switch, Xbox Series X/S, and PC
Price: £7.99
Publisher: Coatsink
Developer: Station Interactive
Release Date: 10th July 2025
Age Rating: 3

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