Is Smalland: Survive the Wilds Worth Your Time On Nintendo Switch 2? Our Definitive Verdict.
The towering blades of grass look like skyscrapers, and a simple puddle feels like a massive lake, immediately setting a tense, atmospheric vibe where you are firmly at the bottom of the food chain. Shrunk down to the size of an ant in a massive backyard garden, the sheer stakes of basic survival hit you instantly as everyday insects become terrifying, formidable monstrosities. Night-time arrives with a heavy dose of pure tension, using fantastic lighting to transform the undergrowth into a pitch-black gauntlet where every shadow feels actively hostile. It forces you to respect the sheer scale of this beautifully perilous 3D world right from the very first step.
[Specs] [Gameplay] [Performance] [Settings]
Smalland: Survive the Wilds Nintendo Switch 2 Review
- Developer: Merge Games
- Publisher: Merge Games
- Official Website: Smalland Official Site
- UK Store Link: Nintendo eShop UK
- Download Size: 12.9GB download size.
- Character Creator Options: Full character creator where you can toggle male and female avatars, body type, head, ears, beard, beard colour, antanae, antanae colour, hair, hair colour, eyes, eye colour, face markings, and name.
- Game Session Settings: Online, friendly fire, private, server password, game presets, peaceful mode, keep inventory on death, day and season cycle, tamed creatures are immortal, and disable building weather deterioration.
- World Creation: You can have many worlds created, and you get to name them.
Smalland: Survive the Wilds Nintendo Switch 2 Review
This adventure survival gameplay drops you straight into a massive world where you are completely small, starting out your journey in a garden where even simple ants are formidable enemies. You have a full 3D game world where you play in third person with 360-degree camera control, but you can thankfully go into first person at any point with a quick click. The progression relies heavily on tutorial pop-ups that trigger as you play and unlock new abilities or mechanics, alongside hidden Owl effigies scattered about that let you learn about the world or grab helpful tips, which all get saved directly into your journal. To navigate and survive, you use an antenna mode that scans the local area to show resources and materials you can gather, while revealing nearby enemies with brief stats on them, including a visible rank above their head to denote how strong they are. I really like that for gathering and breaking down simple resources and materials, you can just hold a button down rather than mashing it constantly. When you attack or harvest something, it will show a health bar, and your map fills in as you explore, allowing you to place your own custom markers with your own text, though it asks you for text every single time, which gets a bit repetitive.
Combat is a stamina-based system for running and fighting, built around a hack-and-slash style where you can throw out light and heavy attacks, block incoming strikes, and roll around to avoid damage. Managing your survival means keeping a constant eye on your health bar, energy, and hunger levels, though keeping a full stomach will slowly heal your health over time. You have a handy hotbar on your HUD that lets you drag and drop items, weapons, and tools so you can quickly choose and swap them out during a fight. Everything you carry has durability and can break, but repair kits can be crafted easily to fix your gear. Crafting itself features a full in-menu system for basics, and you build structures to craft bigger things. Building and placing structures is simple and easy to get going; you just select the hammer, pick your structure, and place it. You can craft multiples of items in one single go, and campfires can be used to cook food items in real time. There is also an emote wheel that allows you to ping locations when playing online in co-op or single player, and encounters with other characters offer multiple-choice options, which are completely text-based without any voice work. Ultimately, you play how you want and kind of make your own story and adventure.
Smalland: Survive the Wilds Nintendo Switch 2 Review: Performance & Fidelity
- Overall Visuals: Awesome graphics that bring the oversized world to life beautifully.
- Performance State: The performance is OK, but it definitely suffers from stuttering and slowdown, especially in built-up areas or when fire or water is around on screen.
- Loading Times: Loading times are OK; they can feel a bit long on the initial world load, but then it gets a bit better after that.
Settings, Customisation & Control Details
- Graphics Settings: Depth of field intensity slider and a brightness slider.
- Controller Settings: Invert axis, sensitivity sliders, and you can fully remap the controls.
- Audio Sliders: Separate sliders for UI, effects, music, and master volume.
- Hints & Tutorials: Toggle options to show inputs, show contextual hints, and show tutorials.
- Language & Accessibility: Camera shake intensity, force feedback scale, arachnophobia toggle, ui scale slider, and language selection.
- Preferences Settings: Hold to sprint, hide HUD, show time and weather, show willowisps, notifications for guild invitation, and a field of view slider.
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Smalland: Survive the Wilds Nintendo Switch 2
Summary
GOOD STUFF
The world looks absolutely gorgeous on the screen, delivering awesome graphics that make the giant scale of the backyard look stunning. I love the pure convenience built into the gathering mechanics, especially how you can just hold down a single button to break down and harvest simple resources instead of wearing your thumbs out. The building and crafting systems are incredibly smooth to operate, letting you slap structures down with the hammer easily, cook food in real time on the fire, and whip up massive batches of items all in one go. Plus, the character creator is packed with details, letting you tweak everything from your antennae colour to your beard style before diving into a world that gives you the total freedom to play exactly how you want.
BAD STUFF
The performance really struggles to keep up when things get busy, leaving you with annoying stuttering and slowdown whenever you wander into heavily built-up bases or get near fire and water effects. It is a massive pain that the custom map markers you carefully place and label do not actually show up on your HUD compass, rendering your personalised waypoints totally pointless for the vast majority of your travels across the map. The opening hours feel completely directionless, and I seriously wish the game had a bit more structure early on, just so you can properly get to grips with all the mechanics. To top it off, the long initial world loading times test your patience, the text-based conversations feel a bit flat without any real voice work, and having the game constantly badger you with a text prompt every single time you drop a map marker gets old incredibly fast.
FINAL VERDICT
Smalland: Survive the Wilds serves up a brilliantly atmospheric survival sandbox that nails the terrifying wonder of being completely microscopic. The core loop of building up your base, crafting armour, and fighting off angry ants is incredibly satisfying, even if the lack of early guidance leaves you stumbling around in the dark for a bit. It is a shame the performance chugs and stutters when the screen gets busy, and the broken compass markers are a proper annoyance during long treks. If you can overlook the lack of voice acting and some technical jank, this is a deeply rewarding miniature odyssey well worth embarking on.
