15.2 hours played
Written 13 days ago
Fun game, but I have one major gripe with this game (And other puzzle games that suffer from this same problem).
There seems to be a disproportionate amount of RNG when it comes to getting the perfect expansion hexes and tiles to place within them for classic mode (or high-score mode). This is great for randomness' sake, but when you have to score a certain amount of points, its insanely frustrating to constantly score the same amount of points or less no matter what you do differently. Long explanation below, skip to the end for my summary of the game as a whole.
Let's take the Continental Medium stage as the prime and major example:
-To score "3 stars" on that stage you need to score 2100 points. There are river cards that give a point bonus to adjacent biome tiles, and ponds that do the same.
-Placing a perfect biome involves 12 like tiles and 3 like animals. (Think 12 forest tiles with 3 boars).
-You unlock the large expansions as you score more points, and each expansion is a large hexagon made up of 19 smaller hexagons.
-If you place a row of three ponds you score the most bonus points.
-If you have a river of at least 18 tiles you unlock the water mill, which gives an additional bonus to each water tile (Rivers and ponds).
-Ideally, you would strategically place biome tiles in a way that it utilizes the river bonus and at least one pond bonus. The only way to truly do this is to plan ahead for river and pond placement, taking into account the different tile elevations that influence the river's path and making sure not to place ponds directly adjacent to any rivers.
With those things in mind, imagine you get the perfect expansions to allow for an early 18 tile long river, unlocking the water mill. You manage to correctly use all the provided tiles for biomes of exactly 12 tiles, with as many rows of three ponds as possible and any extra rivers are no longer than 3 tiles. The ponds aren't touching the rivers anywhere, there is little to no wasted space with sharp turns in the rivers, and you have 3 matching animals in every biome. You have likely scored every single point you can, and you're sitting 200-300 points short of the 2100 needed for the "3 star" rating. You try again, getting a similar score with a seemingly completely different configuration. You try a third time, and you eke out 10 more points from the sheer luck of getting an extra pond this time around.
Now fast forward 2 hours, you still haven't gotten past the 1900 point mark and there is no explanation anywhere as to why. The only thing you can do is hope you randomly get an extra couple river or pond cards and that the expansion hexes you get are good enough that you can get the long river needed for the watermill quickly so you can maybe score more points this time, possibly. Now don't get me wrong, I get this is a puzzle game, but whats the point of any puzzle if there's no surefire solution to it? If you're relying on RNG to draw the perfect tiles and get the best possible hex configurations, it ends up being extremely frustrating when it doesn't happen after dozens of attempts. It also takes away from the challenge of the puzzle when there's not always a solution.
A good puzzle is solvable in one way with a set outcome. A great puzzle is solvable in multiple ways and has different outcomes that are all counted as success by the puzzle's parameters. A bad puzzle is one that relies on chance and bashing your head against the wall enough times that it eventually works. I hate nothing more than a puzzle game that relies mostly on RNG to achieve an outcome. This game unfortunately has that exact thing as part of its core mechanics. After 15 hours that has turned me off entirely to the rest of the game, regardless of its better or not. I also just don't want to spend hours retrying a puzzle because I can't get "lucky" enough to score enough points.
Summary:
Great game that suffers from a glaring negative; you will not be able to solve or "3 star" every stage consistently due to card draws and expansions being completely randomized while requiring a set score to complete. I can't really recommend it when there's better options out there like Dorfromantik or Islanders that do the same things in a much less frustrating format.
