Smalland is a game filled with so much promise and potential that just feels undelivered. I was incredibly excited to pick this game up and dive in with my friends and community but in the end we have left it feeling jaded, disheartened and honestly quite angry.

The game suffers from some major scaling issues in terms of combat, resources, attributes and in the end difficulty. Levelling up and using your attribute points gives a 1 for 1 return on invest which is frankly not enough in terms of health or stamina. Spending 10 attribute points to get 10 extra HP or Stamina is not worth it when the enemies will still easily two-shot you when using max-level appropriate armour. A better system would be getting a better return on your attribute investment, maybe 1 point = 5hp or stamina, otherwise the gains are utterly negligible. Increasing move speed with dexterity is great and maybe that should remain as a one point = one percent improvement just as that could get silly very fast otherwise.

The intelligence stat's usefulness is NOT clear at all, having little to no impact early game and then requiring an obscene amount of points to be able to repair certain equipment, not available until character level 80 or 120 for max repair. Putting points into Intelligence in the early game is useless, only making a difference much later when you'd then be able to repair superior or better equipment from improving it. A better system would be that intelligence would enhance the stats of the equipment by a percentage based scale like dexterity. Meaning a player could put points in to become a group's blacksmith, crafting enhanced equipment for their friends.

Combat suffers because of the attribute point system's inadequacies. Because you don't gain anything meaningful from improving your stats, you're entirely dependent on armour value to protect you from enemies. Which is fine when revisiting earlier areas after your armour tier has moved on, but at the time can make it a crushing slog to work through. Enemy damage is still easily a two-three hit KO on you. Admittedly this is tied to the creatures scaling with more players but then this discourages playing a multiplayer game with your friends because it makes combat so punishingly difficult. You HAVE to have everyone fighting or the creature will systematically wipe everyone out.

It's a nice feature that you don't drop armour or your currently equipped weapon on death, it makes those inevitable death runs that little bit less intimidating, but only in weaker earlier areas that you're traversing to get back there. Once you're in the newer zone and fighting the appropriate enemy it becomes almost pointless having armour again.

Now to address resources. Resources supposedly become more plentiful while playing with friends, but on default world settings and playing with 6 people, a scrap iron node more often than not doesn't provide enough iron for a single ingot. This makes mining the resource incredibly tedious, arguably one of the most tedious item hauls in the game as once you progress past Iron, it's pretty easy to obtain the other materials from resources nodes. Pyrite for example serves multiple purposes and is abundantly plentiful when mined. Later resource requirements can be a little time consuming, especially with regards to gaining Hoots required to purchase the best flying mount available.

Now to talk about mounts. Mounts are one of the USPs of the game, taming a creature in order to use them to get around and fight beside you as a companion is one of the things that drew me to this game. And it's one of the most disappointing features. Ladybugs are pretty much pointless as I very very rarely encountered a situation where my inventory was full and a pack mule was necessary. By no means should the devs reduce the inventory size, but until the update that allows you to have multiple companion bugs/creatures the ladybug is pointless. As are most other creatures past the Grasshopper. Once you're able to tame grasshoppers, there is no reasonable point in taming anything else until a Hornet. Geckos and Spiders, despite being universally known for their abilities to climb, don't benefit from the ability to climb surfaces or vertical surfaces while riding them...the one thing you'd want them to do. I get that this is likely so they don't overwhelm you in combat, climbing vertical spaces and attacking you, or appearing in the tree encampments because they climbed the tree but maybe just make it a thing for tamed geckos and spiders?

Creature levels...fighting wild creatures with higher levels seems intimidating but in practice appears to serve no purpose either. This is also due to how the attribute point system works. Investing time into levelling your creature gets little to no worthwhile return. Get your grasshopper, hop about and clear massive jumps until you can get a hornet and improve it's speed and stamina to fly around quickly.

Finally, the final boss. I love the concept, I love the idea of the 'dungeon' leading to him but with the challenges the combat system faces, it's an absolute nightmare. You will inevitably perish fighting the 50+ enemies along the structure, making the death run process absolutely agonising. Not to mention that you can't fly through the area without getting hammered with turrets, making buying the best air mount pretty much pointless. So if you die, it's a long walk from the nearest encampment tree or make a smaller, less secure and useful base nearby. If you manage to reclaim your gear and fight your way up to the boss, great. But if you die in the boss fight you've got to climb the whole thing again to reclaim your dropped gear, which you needed to get through it in the first place.

Maybe introduce some shortcut checkpoints in order to speed up the process without making it an absolute chore. Ultimately I, and my friends, quit playing due to this. While we came up against many bugs and issues and faults, we stuck it out for completionists sake but the final boss pushed us over the edge.

There are other bugs and issues but they can be addressed in time, the game suffers from some major gameplay flaws that are holding it back from being the incredibly fun and enjoyable experience it promised to be.

Minus the bugs (no pun intended) this is a fantastic game that I can't wait to see more content for.

Pros:
- world is beautiful and expansive
- progression is steady
- modify settings for a challenging or chill experience
- NPCs don't waffle on
- very manageable on controller

Cons:
- placed items cannot be moved, they have to be dismantled and rebuilt
- dragonfly mount physics are infuriating, couldn't wait to ditch it for a different flying mount
- inventory gets full quickly

small edit: i have tamed a grasshopper and it is very cool but the rest still stands.

This game should definitely not be advertising that it is in the finished state. 1.0. this game might be in 0.1.0 but it is not fully released even though it says so.

The game is very bland and I've been playing for a good bit. Ants and other insects just attack you on sight which makes sense, but their aggro radius is humongous and the combat is choppy and somewhat bad. It kind of feels like the Gwyn fight where you just parry and win the game.

There aren't anywhere near as many critters as i was hoping. the building is fine. i haven't tamed anything yet but im about to tame a grasshopper, so i guess that's cool.


Instead of listing everything ill just say this.
The game has signs of serious potential. The animations are eh, a lot of things are eh, but i can see what the vision is and i like it but it does not feel anywhere near what a game that is on full release should feel like.

Hell, fallout 76 day one felt like more of a fleshed out game than this and that game was ♥♥♥♥.