A Sterling VR Survivor Adventure

Bootstrap Island exits Early Access as a fully realized VR survival adventure that stands up to any top game in the genre.

I openly admit when I played Bootstrap Island in Early Access over a year ago, I wrote it off as a single-mechanic glorified tech demo without much staying power beyond chasing leaderboards for ‘the most nights survived.’ I admit this to kick off this 1.0 release review because Maru VR’s work should be commended. This is a prime example of how to use Early Access correctly.

Bootstrap casts players as Daniel, a shipwreck survivor stranded on a desert island. A brief prologue doubles as a tutorial and sets up the ‘hero’s quest’ for the survivor with other intermittent cutscenes at the end of each chapter to flesh out the story.

The early game is all standard survival tropes. Find food, find water, and find a good spot for a fire for the night. Nightfall is when the game kicks into gear as you find yourself surrounded by a pack of animals (it varies from night to night) trying to kill you. Unlike Song in the Smoke, failing to light a fire here is an instant death without an already lit torch. The whole day/night sequence lasts about ten minutes (this can be adjusted in settings), and keeps the tension sky high while exploring the island. When the sun sets, there’s an immediate sense of peril, even if you are already prepared.

The island itself is the star here. The environment is stunning to look at, up there with some of the best visuals on PC VR. This does come at a cost though. This game is a performance hog. I recently upgraded my PC and I’m glad I did because my old hardware, an RTX 3070 on a Ryzen 5 5600X, did not run this game well, even on the lowest settings. If you are running a mid tier rig, be prepared to fiddle with settings to find the best balance of performance vs graphics.

Bootstrap Island has a roguelite element to it. If/when you die, the campaign brutally starts over from chapter one. It does, mercifully, have autosave, so you can leave in the middle of a run and pick it up later. A full run will take a few hours with all cutscenes included, so don’t expect to complete your first full run in one session. My first completed run was about nine total hours with exploring as much as I could and there is a lot to explore in this game.

Similar to other survival games like Green Hell, you can repeat the survival loop into perpetuity without being forced onto the campaign path. The game will nudge you in that direction, but anyone who wants a more simple survival adventure is free to play it that way. The aforementioned leaderboards from Early Access remain for those looking to top the charts. There are also settings for those who just want to explore the game to turn off parts or all of the survival elements, allowing for a more relaxed experience.

Over the last year, Maru VR updated Bootstrap with new areas to explore, creatures, and features like the hallucination system. Taken at time of release, they just seem like more threats to manage, but it all comes together in the story. The final release also brings a tribe native to the island. This is, for my money, the best part of the game. You have to learn how to communicate with the tribe and your interactions will foster either a good or bad relationship. Said relationship opens up bartering (positive) or outright hostility (negative).

Bootstrap Island is not without its flaws though. Sometimes during a night attack, creatures would glitch into the environment, especially if I kept my back against a cliff wall or cave to cover one possible attack angle. Then they’d just disappear at sunrise. It happened often enough that I would actually try to force the glitch just to make the overnight sections easier.

Grabbing is a bit cumbersome. Bootstrap Island uses a palm-facing ‘gravity-like’ system to pop items up to your hand. It requires a decent sense of timing and more often than not I crouched to pick up items.

Combat can also be clunky. Loading the gun has to be done very deliberately, which is problematic while also dodging wild animals. The bow & arrow requires a similar amount of precision. It all works, but it’s not exactly fluid and suffers from the sort of jank one often finds in heavy physics-based VR games.

Bootstrap Island 1.0: Final Verdict

The full release of Bootstrap Island lives up to its early promise with a highly engaging, immersive, and at times disturbing adventure that stands as one of VR’s best survival titles. Any issues I had will likely be ironed out with further patches, but this is already a great time in VR.

UploadVR uses a 5-Star rating system for our game reviews – you can read a breakdown of each star rating in our review guidelines.