Recent reviews by DoomSoda

I have mixed feelings on Raft. Aesthetically, visually, graphically, it's very charming, and I enjoy it. It's bright, colorful, and the idea of living on the ocean on a floating home is interesting and creative. The random islands you encounter are somewhat lackluster, but the story islands and other landmarks are quite fun.

But the biggest issue I have with the game, and the reason I hesitate on whether or not to recommend the game, is its core gameplay loop. The idea is that you gather resources to expand and upgrade your ship, research and build better tools, which allows you to more efficiently gather resources and gather more advanced resources to build even better tools, and so on and so forth. Unfortunately, as a solo player, this process takes quite a while, as I imagine the game was designed with multiple people gathering resources simultaneously in mind. Long enough that I would say this game is really quite a chore for a solo player to reach the end of the game. And that's not the only problem a solo player will face.

The Shark.
The biggest issue for a solo player starting this game is that damnable shark. There is a shark that follows your raft around for the entire duration of the game, and interferes with everything you try to do. Try to build out your ship? The shark takes bites out of it every so often. Try to gather resources underwater? The shark takes bites out of you until you die. Yes, there are ways to preoccupy the shark so you can gather unmolested. Yes, there are ways to kill the shark and have a few brief moments to yourself before it respawns. Yes, there are ways to prevent the shark from damaging your raft. But the core issue is that the shark makes it necessary to consumes time and resources just to make it go away temporarily, which delays progress. The shark is not a difficult opponent, but its something you HAVE to deal with, which means spending the fish to use shark bait, or using up spear or bow durability to "kill" it. With multiple players, you have a bit more leeway, since the shark will only target one person at a time, but then you have to deal with the problems multiplayer presents.

Because you only have one raft.
If you play with a group of people that have one, singular vision of what your raft should evolve to look like at any given moment, I believe you will have an absolutely fantastic time playing Raft. But I sincerely doubt that is ever the case. Playing with others means you will have to compromise on how your raft will look, how resources should be spent, and where you should sail to. It is inefficient for everyone to gather their own personal resources, because you have to have what you wish to gather in mind when you are actually sailing/anchoring. For example, if player 1 is in dire need of plastic, and player 2 could really use some metal, then they have to prioritize either plastic or metal ore, as you mainly get plastic through sailing and ores through mining them at the reef of an island. Since you would then gravitate towards pooling your resources and where to go based on what you need communally, expect to get a little frustrated if somebody uses all of a particular resource without you realizing, or "wastes" resources on things you find to be trivial or unimportant at that time. Personally, as anti-social as I am, I found it to be somewhat exhausting after a while to think about trying to make the game enjoyable for everyone at cost to my own, and that was what eventually made me not want to play the game anymore.

But do I recommend this game? I believe that for $20, I got more than enough fun out of the game that I cannot say I didn't get my money's worth. Despite its charm and polish I have significant problems with the game, but whether or not you will find them to be deal-breakers as I have is, as it always will be, up to your personal preferences. Thus, I can't say it's a bad game or of poor quality; it's just not very compatible with me.

So, what makes these kinds of games fun for me (Crush the Castle, Angry Birds, Some Math Game I Played During Elementary School That Wasn't Blocked), is seeing everything collapse after knocking down a pillar or taking out a wall. Though I also keep the objectives in mind, seeing a gigantic structure crumble to dust with just a few well-placed cannonballs/dynamite/boulders is what's fun about these games.

In Blasted Fortress, while the cannonballs are tied to physics, the fortresses aren't. Taking out an entire layer to a fortress does not split apart the roof and send it tumbling down, and taking out the bottom of a tower does not cause it to topple. Nothing moves, actually... no matter how much damage you do, every (intact) block stays exactly where it was at the beginning of the siege. This is my biggest complaint; it's taking away my reward. I don't give a ♥♥♥♥ about making money, or completing random levels, or completing minigames, or whatever other side content the game has to offer. I just want the fortress to be ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ BLASTED.

As for all of the side content, it comes completely out of the blue after that short (but helpful) tutorial when you start a new game. It tells you how to shoot, how to block, and where to go if you want to do more shooting and blocking, but for minigames, passive income, monster hunting(?), voodoo magic, penalty blocks (and different block types in general), and whatever else I missed in the ten minutes I played, you're going to have to read a few tooltips. Thankfully, the UI design doesn't make this very hard. Developer, if you're reading this, I would suggest broadening the tutorial a little bit, or have a very tiny tutorial compaign to explain a few more details before the player is thrust into the town screen. Having so much information thrust in front of me at once turned me off from the game more than it excited me.

I won't nitpick any more than this, but really, it should be more like what it's inspired by... Angry Birds.

This game is the most cancerous pile of ♥♥♥♥ I've ever seen in a videogame.

But hey, it taught me not to buy early access games (generally).