Love Island Review – Definitely Not Reality TV

Let’s get the obvious bit out of the way first. Love Island (the game) has absolutely nothing to do with Love Island the cringe-worthy UK and US reality TV show where a collection of ‘pretty’ people are thrust together in an island resort, tasked with pairing up, flirting with each other, pretending to be glamorous and absolutely not just playing along to get a free holiday and TV exposure out of it.

Introduction

Love Island (the PSN game) is the next installment of porting publisher Big Way’s fan-service games which seem to be rather dominating the PSN store this summer. Whilst Big Way are responsible for a plethora of games of various genres, their anime fan-service budget-games seem to be filling a gap in the market over on PSN. If you’re curious about their other titles, maybe look into the EmyLiveShow games, the Anime Uni series and Love Island’s successor, Lovely Crush (with its surprisingly pretty title screen).

Love Island is a classic match-three + puzzle game with RPG elements which mirror stat-based combat scenarios as you try to seduce the charming anime girls of Love Island. Fresh off the back of reviewing Dead or Alive Xtreme 3, I found myself once again in a simulated vacation of sorts, though with fewer girls to flirt with this time. Seducing each of the five available beauties unlocks a set of HD-2D animated CG scenes for your viewing pleasure. The game was released on June 19th, 2024.

Story

Taking on the role of a nameless ‘horny traveler’ (that’s literally what the game calls the protagonist), our hero takes on the challenge of seducing the gorgeous girls of Love Island. There’s a hint of magic in the air, as the rules and causality of Love Island are somewhat extraordinary and otherworldly, but playing the ‘game’ brings rewards for those who master it. The girls of Love Island are not easy to seduce; They will try to push you away, shattering your confidence.

There are four girls to begin with, Julie the bubbly hotel concierge, Jane the romantic beach lifeguard, Andre the overly dominant maid, and Misty, an animal-girl who loves to drink and party. Word travels fast on Love Island, and scoring with each of these lovely ladies might just get you a chance with the humourously named DJ, Cumchita.

Gameplay

Your confidence can be seen in the pink heart. This works as a substitute for a life bar. Rejections will damage your heart, so it’s important to exercise caution. To seduce a girl, you’ll swap around connecting tiles on-screen to form matching rows which you’ll ‘collect’. You’ll want to collect tiles of the same colour of three or more in a row. To restore your confidence, you’ll need to drink, which is done by collecting green tiles.

Collected gems will disappear and you will increase the girl’s love or restore your confidence. If your confidence drops to zero, you will end up ‘friend-zoned’ and lose. If you collect four tiles of the same colour in a row, the seduction and/or confidence will increase more, and a ‘love’ tile will appear. Collecting love tiles boosts your energy.

If you collect five or more tiles of the same colour in a row, this will push the seduction/confidence levels even higher, and a pink ‘super love’ tile will also appear. Super love tiles are very useful, as they can be placed in a row with tiles of any colour. By collecting a super love tile, you will not only gain energy, but also money which can be spent on gifts or recovery items.

The energy you accrue is displayed on a scale at the bottom of the screen. Above the energy scale are abilities and their cost in energy points. These abilities are your special moves for use in emergencies. Each serves a specific purpose, such as delivering a critical hit, recovering some lost confidence, or reshuffling all present tiles which can potentially deliver a devastating combo.

The seduction scale is displayed on the right side of the screen. Raise it to the maximum to seduce your chosen girl. The number displayed above it indicates the number of moves you can make before the girl starts challenging you with negative comments. These challenges decrease your confidence. The higher level the girl’s stage is (from 1 to 3) the more damaging these challenges will be and the more seduction she will require to win over.

Graphics/Sound

Each of the five lovely ladies available are nicely drawn and blend well into their backgrounds. Once the gameplay kicks in, these 2D sprites will come to life and react accordingly to your performance, laughing, smiling, scowling etc. It’s simple yet solid animation that works well, until your chosen girl starts dancing and her sprite wriggles all over the place which looks a bit weird.

As a fan-service game, particular effort has been made with each girl’s assortment of costumes. Progressing with each stage will result in the girl on-screen changing into a skimpier swimsuit as you begin to seduce her, or if you’re not at the beach then the girl will gradually remove an item or two of clothing to reveal some surprisingly detailed and elegant lingerie.

Cutscenes before and after stages aren’t voiced, but you will encounter the occasional voice sample, yelling “Woohoo!” during happy moments, or making loud kissing sounds if you clear a stage that leads to some narrative canoodling. The music works well enough and is themed for each stage, but with so few stages you won’t find much variety here.

Replayability/Trophies

Replayability is key in seeing everything Love Island has to show you, which sadly isn’t all that much. What begins as a basic puzzle game quickly evolves into a challenging RPG combat scenario. Working through each girl’s ‘levels’ will see their resistance to your charms improve. This means their stats are higher now, which means yours will also need to be if you hope to claim victory.

Completing each stage will award you with a chosen boost to one of your stats which makes you that bit more efficient in the next round. You can also purchase additional stat upgrades from the island’s shop with in-game currency. The higher your stats, the longer you’ll last in each stage. The difficulty jumps up quickly from round to round, while more stern girls like Andre can be a nightmare to endure against.

Each girl’s third and final stage can be brutal, and so you’ll need to prepare by replaying stages over and over to grab stat boosts to improve both your offense and defence. This means a lot of grinding. You’ll need to make peace with replaying stages over and over just to survive, and you’ll need nothing short of a miracle to defeat DJ Cumchita, the game’s equivalent of a final boss, and you’ll need to beat her to get your platinum trophy.

Conclusion

Love Island pushes a lot of undesirable grind onto you just to ‘defeat’ the final girl and see everything there is to see. Like any Dark Souls enthusiast will tell you, there is a certain reward in finally defeating a powerful foe, but at the same time the question must be asked; is it worth the effort? With very little story, minimalist fan-service and no real ending, the answer is a confident “no”.

Yes, after beating the final girl, all you get for your effort is a platinum trophy. That’s it. I’m not sure what I was expecting after finishing the final stage, but I was expecting something, anything really. No ‘fade to black’ scenes with exaggerated kissing sounds, no more clothing to shed to push the boundaries, no secret artwork or bonus content, nothing, not even a credits reel.

I also noticed a couple of potential bugs in the game too, as a few times I found my stat boost rewards didn’t kick in, while other times there seemed to be a delay and they didn’t update until after I completed another stage. Also, an annoyance was a strange revelation; when you fail a stage, your progress completely resets with every girl, rather than just the one who you failed to seduce. Fortunately, you’ll need to replay countless stages anyway.

As addictive as the simple gameplay must have been to keep me playing until the very end, what we really have is a budget 60 minute micro-game with so much mandatory grind crammed in that your playtime will likely exceed 5 hours in total. It’s certainly doable if you’re desperate for another platinum trophy, but that’s all you’re really getting out of it.