Ylands review (Switch): Don’t go down with this ship

I’ve always been interested in the open ocean, sailing, pirates, and anything that fits that bill. YLands, while not necessarily a “pirate game,” has some of those themes. I was intrigued by the concept of the game, and I’ve got an itch for survival crafting. Unfortunately, despite my interest in it, the negative aspects greatly outweighed the positives during my time playing it. Despite some interesting ideas, YLands often falls flat, leaving the player feeling more annoyed than anything else.

Tedious Exploration and Progression

I have always been a sucker for survival games. Walking around, collecting resources, fighting wildlife, and exploring have always been fun yet therapeutic. For a bit, YLands does this right. One feature I particularly enjoyed was the collect-all button. This allowed players to collect all of the resources they were looking at in a certain vicinity. For example, when cutting down a tree, after hitting the fallen shaft, it will split into logs. Using the collect-all pick-up feature on these logs will gather all of them up at once rather than having to pick each up individually. This added to that therapeutic sense of the game and made me feel like I would make progress, learning new skills in the game’s skill trees as I explored my first few YLands. Going from Yland to YLand on my newly crafted boat was something that initially came with a great sense of exploration; I was excited, thinking about the things I could find. But as I continued playing the game, that sense of progress and exploration quickly faded.

Like many survival crafting games, YLands has players craft items using recipes. These recipes can be unlocked through the player’s menu and are split into multiple tech trees, such as combat, building, manufacturing, etc. These recipes are unlocked by providing a set of resources. The issue that arises from these recipes is finding the resources. Many survival crafting games take place on a single map or world; in these instances, the player may know where to go when looking for new resources and items. Instead, the world of YLands is split into six different island chains, all characterized by a different climate. Some resources are easier to find in some chains than others. Because of this, Ylands feels like it forces players to prioritize the skill tree rather than taking their time to explore other aspects the game has to offer. This forces the player to frequently travel from chain to chain, which becomes tedious, as players are constantly having to travel through loading screens. It takes away from the immersion of exploration that many survival games offer, and it makes finding resources feel like a chore rather than something that should feel rewarding. 

Jumping between islands greatly discourages the player from most forms of building. In my time playing Ylands, I never felt the need to build any bases or buildings on any YLands, as I never spent more than an hour in any location I came across. This may discourage a lot of survival crafting fans who are interested in the building aspects of the game. In the very late game, it may be viable for players to begin to set up bases, but there is no benefit to doing so in the early to mid-game. Instead, players may rather focus on building upon their ships, which are more limited in space. Even building upon the ships can feel a little clunky sometimes, which can be frustrating. 

When players do try to take a break from trying to find resources to explore, they’ll likely be unsatisfied. Each island chain offers around 10-15 YLands to explore. But many of the YLands within climate regions feel the same, varying little from one another. And outside of collection resources, there are few things to entice the player to further exploring. Sometimes, the player may find an abandoned building with scrolls that can reveal recipes or containers with resources, but nothing that ever feels important or grand enough to encourage the player to continue exploring. Oftentimes, it feels like rather than the dozens of islands that the game consists of, it is rather just a handful. However, the most frustrating thing about exploring Ylands and moving from area to area is the game’s poor performance. 

Lackluster Performance

There has been a lot of discourse on the capability of the Switch’s hardware in recent years. That said, the console is more than capable of running this game. YLands is an older title, and it isn’t a very demanding one at that. YLands performance on Switch isn’t good. Loading screens barrage the experience at every turn. Moving between islands and different climates is a common occurrence, but being met with a loading screen every time was highly aggravating, especially because there were common frame rate drops when this happened. Even opening menus, which can feel janky in their own right, brought up some small loading hiccups.

YLands is an online-only game, which isn’t a great formula for something like the Nintendo Switch. Even when playing alone, you have to be connected to the internet. Throughout my time playing Ylands, there were three separate times that the game crashed. Because it is an online-only game, you are left to the mercy of the autosave system to maintain your progress. In my case, I lost a lot of progress that I had to make up for a few times the game crashed. This only soured the experience more, considering that I already wasn’t a fan of the game’s exploration and progression.

YLands’s gameplay is fun at times, but despite that, its shortcomings massively outweigh the good. Between the poor performance, progression system, tedious exploration, and crashes, I often looked forward to putting the game down rather than picking it up.

Ylands was reviewed for Nintendo Switch with a code provided by Bohemia Interactive. It is also available on PC and Android phones.

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