Recent reviews by Doughkey

Creates a new standard for farming sims

Has Asher

Certainly a master piece of pizza

SUPA SMASH BROTHAS MELEE BAYBEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE

This game does the bare minimum of everything it claims to have. Some things in the games 'About' are rather disingenuous to this as well; this is the inspiration in creating an extensive and spoiler-free review. The combat, farming, quests, dialog and environments are the same exact cliches as every other game of this type. Everything felt uninspired and dry. All in all this had a feeling of being an early access game where all major mechanics were present but had yet to be fleshed out. Many games fall into this category, and a lot of them make up for it by being charming or unique in some niche- this game does not.

I rate this game: 30/100.


Combat: All combat in this game is easy. Min/maxing or discussing what is the best becomes rather arbitrary. It is worth noting that everything in this game has too much health though so any and all thought to your gear should revolve around the idea of DPS, not defense. There is little room for meaningful customization and there is little to no satisfaction to be had as it all feels quite clunky.

There are 2 types of weapons: Sword and Bow. Despite what the 'About' claims, there is only one melee weapon, just with different skins. Sword completely outclasses bow save for one or 2 sub bosses who do not like you to be within 20 feet of them. The best sword will easily double the DPS of the best bow. Magic is broken up into 4 different types- these mean very little in the scope of things. Your only defensive option is a fully intangible and easily spammable Dark Souls roll. Movement in this game is unpleasant as you only have one static movement speed (not counting passive speed buffs), no strafing or backstepping, and all weapons simply attack while you stand relatively still. This game does have an unintentional form of roll-cancelling which will become the bread and butter to your entire game worth of poking and rolling around beefy boys who attack once every 5 seconds with their 1 of 3 telegraphed attacks. Upgrade your sword and dump all of your resources into Fire magic and you will roll-cancel your way into the final boss with ease and clunky grace.

Farming: This seems to have been added last minute, it doesn't fit into the story, nor does it feel natural to the rest of the gameplay. Unlike other farm games you will not tend to the farm and then go out adventuring and mingling with town folk- it feels like a completely separate entity. I believe it feels this way because there is no reason to 'complete' a day. There are no seasons, nothing is time sensitive, there are no festivals or varied NPC routes except for a day/night cycle... Really the game is the same no matter when you play it. There is no reason to simply not plant some seeds, water them, and then sleep until the next day so you can water them again. And this will take just enough time so your long commute to the next objective will suddenly become that much less worth it from the time investment you spent watering. There is no fertilizer, there are no animals, there is not even any form of farm decorations or utility items like a sprinkler. You throw down some seeds (any seeds), water them, and you have a 1.8x profit margin in a few days. The games description says you can tend to your farm to make potions- I actually don't know what this could be referring to, there are no potions. There is no content here, simply a chore to make money... which leads into what I believe is the biggest flaw of the game.

Grinding: I love grinding, genuinely. I ENJOY wasting my time doing repetitive tasks to see some kind of palpable improvement. But I HATE the grinding in Kitaria Fables. I have all the achievements in this game, this says 31 hours at the moment, but if we disregard AFK time it would be around 26 hours. At least 20 of these hours was dedicated to grinding. Maybe 4 hours of this was spent farming for money, 12 hours of this was for collecting materials to upgrade equipment and finish fetch quests, and the last 4 hours was spent periodically trying to get the achievement of killing 3000 enemies.

Everything costs way too much money, and nothing in this game sells for much money at all, making the only way to make money fall into the lap of my previously explained sham of a farming mechanic. I will state this affirmatively: You need a lot of money for your gear to stay relevant. And while the 'About' section will say there is crafting- this is simply handing a list of items to the designated NPC, that is the full extent of 'crafting'. There is no way to make money except for farming. This is the single worst implementation of Farming I have ever seen. Wasting your time is unavoidable.

The material requirements for equipment and quests is... fair. For any one upgrade to a piece of equipment I don't think you will spend more than an hour trying to collect it if you are efficient and willing to google the best place to go. This will be quite standard if you've played similar games. You will zone in and out of a densely populated room full of the required enemy, do some AOE attacks, pray to the gods of RNG, and rezone after a little disappointment. The only problem is that there are not many variations in enemies, there is 0 difficulty involved in killing any regular mobs, and you will really only be farming in maybe... 4 different places because for some reason only several mobs give anything useful, and they often give MULTIPLE useful items.

Environment: There is not a single unique area in the game. Forests, a desert, and an icy mountain. The map you see at the beginning of the game is the entirety of the map. There are 5 pseudo-dungeons in this game. Its almost comical how the game will say: 'Name of dungeon: 1F', but 2 out of 5 of these dungeons only have one room, and the others only have a couple which offer no puzzles or change of pace from the other room. The shallow dungeons are one of the biggest reasons I think this game was just a lazy and premature release, like a project the developers had gotten bored of.

This game advertises itself as cute, but this starts and ends with the cast of characters being animals. The environments are not catered to this theme, they are not detailed, they are not stylized, they are not unique.

Characters and Charm(?): There is none. That is, no charm, and no character. I really like the portrait art of all of the characters and town folks- but not specifically the character designs. The main characters are a Cat, a Polar Bear and a Tiger. Their portraits are cartoon versions of these real life animals, they are not 'designed'. And that's not objectively bad, but if a character has no conspicuous aesthetic, redeemable personality nor any interesting story... Why, HOW, can I care about you?

Main characters and side characters included have little to no personality. They at the very most have a singular trope they ride on. Not every character needs a ton of depth, I know that, but these singular tropes are not even utilized properly in dialog. Lets take the biggest hub for quests, a chinchilla named Pickle. He speaks in third person. And that's it. He will not make jokes, and he will not be clever, he won't do anything any other town person would do. His text can be interchangeable with every other NPC in the game, but will talk in third person.


Co-op: Co-op handled well for an unfinished game. Pretty easy for my partner to pick up and play. While I believe this game needs to be played Co-op to be fun, I do not believe this game is catered to be Co-op in the slightest. Most quests are fetch, delivery, or involve simply talking to somebody. This is not quickened or made any easier by somebody holding a controller next to you.

What a mess

Like melee but even worse and with pay2marth