17.7 hours played
Written 30 days ago
This is a very fun and cute game on the surface, but dig a little and your opinion starts to change.
First, the game mechanics need a lot of help. I am not going to say they are bugging as much as simply annoying. For example, you get chickens really early on and daily you have to pet them, feed them, or clean them. To target the chicken, you have to highlight it with camera movements and then you can interact with it once it is highlighted. It is very annoying because the chicken action box is small and if other chickens are in the way or you move your camera angle slightly, good luck on targeting them!! Everything is designed around this. Any interactions you have with animals, enemies, pets, people, etc. all depend on camera movement highlights which impede your ability to do things quickly. Furthermore, it is very clunky at best. So even if the action boxes for whatever you are targeting are larger, the clunky aspect and lack of smooth transitions between movements and actions make the game very annoying.
Second, the map system is lacking. You do have fast travel as in, once you explore an area you open it up to be able to immediately jump there from your map. However, the map is very rudimentary. When you are exploring, especially in the caves, the map does not offer much for which directions you can go in or where you have previously been to. This would come in handy in the caves! If you are running around, you may run past the same area 3 or 4 times over trying to maneuver around closed sections or sections that need materials to open up all because you were unaware the area had been explored previously. Additionally, the map does not offer landmarks clearly. This is a problem when you are looking at the map and it looks like a wide open area but in reality there is the building you needed and could not quite place because it was not drawn out to help you remember things. Basically, the map is lackluster and looks like it was lazily put together.
Another issue is the progression through certain phases of the game. There are not many clear indications or directions given to help you for progression. For example, many of the things you need to be able to destroy bigger trash piles are upgrades that are purchased with items you grow/obtain through progression. Some of these items can be found in new zones/areas you open up. But some areas cannot be accessed unless you have the upgrades. I was stuck for a long time because no matter where I explored, new or old areas, I could not find the one seed I needed to grow the veggie that I could use to buy an upgrade with. It turned out I needed to do a quest. But the quests seem to be more of an afterthought rather than the major focus of the game. An example of this is quests are accessible through your menu navigation but they cannot be superimposed on your screen to track it (even though the quest offers "tracking") which does not make sense but whatever. The quests do not really give you the idea that it is needed to progress through the game. If you pick up a quest that says "Complete X Task", but you do not realize that the task is needed to open up another area of the caves which in turn will allow you to get the seeds for the next vegetable you need to grow to pay for the upgrades. Instead the quests seem kind of inconsequential to progression, or at least, the lack of making them any type of focus makes it feel that way.
There are a lot of other aspects of the game that are kind of annoying, like how big the structures are and how much room is needed for each one. It makes being able to keep a walk-able and clean area to place things almost impossible as you begin to gather more animals/pets/machines. They did not aesthetically think of how obscure placements of things would interfere with player movement, or how annoying it is to have to place an animal structure exceedingly far away from your home area just to run all the way over there to pet/clean something.
Lets not get started on only being able to craft one animal feed at a time!!!!!!!!!!!! (Maybe the last cooking upgrade changed this but the first two did not!!!) (Yes this annoyed me beyond what it should have!!!)
Basically, the game is mediocre and after playing it for some time, I feel like I kind of wasted my money.
