A promising cozily rewarding game that feels polished already | Early Access Review - Cozy Islands

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✨Overview

Cozy Islands – craft & build revolves around crafting and building, offering players the opportunity to construct their dream village step by step. Developed and provided by Tetrox Limited, it is currently in early access for Android users in the United States, although I was able to access it here on TapTap, even without the need for a VPN. The free-to-play game seems to be fully offline for now with online functionality and in-app purchases. 📖Story and Premise

The game invites players on a journey to rebuild the village of their childhood dreams. Set on an empty plot covered in trees and stones and populated by skilled NPCs from smiths, miners, and lumberjacks, Cozy Islands offers a lighthearted guided experience that combines crafting and building. There is literally no story but the premise sets the stage for a relaxing and fulfilling “Cozy” experience. 🎨Visuals and Art

Cozy Islands – Craft & Build features vibrant, lighthearted visuals and a soundtrack complemented by cel-shaded, cartoonish graphics. The overall art design of the game feels truly professional and polished. Seeing a screenshot or gameplay video, I would not blame you if you mistook it for an actual farming game released for consoles like the Nintendo Switch. 🎮Gameplay

Cozy Islands starts with gathering simple resources like picking up grass, cutting down trees for wood, and breaking down rocks for stone. The gameplay loop revolves around crafting more complex resources with the help of NPC villagers and their workshops — ranging from Sawmills, Stonecutters, Looms, and Furnaces. As players build more structures, new islands and areas unlock, providing access to additional resources and crafting options. The game is all about the satisfaction of building and cultivating your Islands and seeing houses and structures get built over time. Despite the simplicity of the gameplay, it can become surprisingly addictive. ⚒️Building and Crafting

Building is enjoyable as it takes you step by step through the construction of every detail, from foundations and walls to doors, windows, and even decorations. Building the structure is a multi-step process that takes time and requires patience to build. However, you cannot really design it yourself, the building is predetermined and set in stone. The resources and items required in the game are logically connected to the building process. Gathering flowers for decoration, mining stones to build walls, and cutting wood into various variants for different sections of the house are some examples. It all contribute to a cohesive crafting experience that makes perfect sense. The whole game is a pretty guided experience; especially as a crafting and building game, it easily what resources are needed and where to craft it, and even at times where to gather the resources. The mechanics allow players to express their creativity by renovating and building each house step by step, promising both engagement and reward. One gripe I have, though, is with the resource gathering mechanics, as it requires manually multiple taps to keep gathering. A single hold function to keep gathering would have been better and have been less tedious to execute, especially since this is one of the core gameplay elements that you'll be engaging with for most of the time. ⏫Progression

Cozy Islands is a pretty chill game with its premise, but underneath all that is a grindy experience that will force you into waiting in real-time for upgrades and for the limited resources in the environment to respawn. That or you’ll be pressured into spending money to get diamonds, and the costs are expensive. I was able to build the main house for around two hours of play, but in-between those sessions required long sessions of real-time waiting for the resources to respawn as the starting area’s resources to gather is pretty limited. And it gets even more demanding as you play with more structures to build and more complex resources to craft.

📊Technical Performance

The game runs smoothly even in this Early Access version, maintaining a frame rate of over 30FPS, although it is not without minor issues. Occasionally, the UI overlaps when navigating menus quickly, and there are instances where the game locks up, halting all movement and commands, requiring a full restart. As an early access game, the game feels really far off in the development cycle and the game generally feels and looks very polished, even more than many released titles. The game seems to completely function in offline mode, so you don’t need online connection to play, at least in this early access version. ⚖️Conclusion

Cozy Islands – craft & build is a pretty cozy game that lives up to the name and provides a delightful crafting and building experience; and sense of guided accomplishment for players looking to rebuild a cozy village and its surrounding islands. Cozy Islands holds promise as a relaxing and cozily rewarding game, even showcasing a level of polish unusual for an early access title. However, further refinements and additions in its mechanics and balancing the grind for free-to-play users may further enhance its appeal.

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