Recent reviews by Richarad

Got the game when it came out. We're coming up on a year now of the game being out and there's still some major, consistent and glaringly obvious bugs that have been present from day 1 that still persist today. A lot of other ugly bugs got fixed, sure, but for example: some of your settings (might depend on what you had open last; for me it's always the difficulty settings) still regularly reset whenever the day changes or you help someone adopt a dog, among other things; dogs in play areas still horrendously glitch out and rubberband around the map outside the play area (rarely, outside of the map boundaries itself, in which case good luck getting that dog back) if they're left out (unleashed in the play area, which you have to do to play with them) for longer than it takes to play one minigame, basically. Staff seemingly just don't play with dogs or sometimes do certain jobs they're assigned in general (unless I'm misunderstanding what some of the icons for job assignments mean in some way). Heck, the "Report a Bug" button on the main menu opens a broken link in your browser that doesn't actually load anything. Dogs can objects can still -- albeit much rarer than before -- glitch heavily on occasion (sometimes if I delete a play area, the ball it spawns with will remain forever, for example; and dogs like to get stuck on things/prevent me from moving semi-frequently, as well as glitching out whenever they're off-leash and outside of a kennel for more than a roughly one minute or if I walk out of view range of them). There's GUI and UI issues with MANY of the window size settings (or maybe it's just windowed mode in general, I can't really tell), usually involving part of the UI being cut off (to various degrees) by the screen borders and/or become uninteractable entirely (usually in combination with buttons being overlapped or cut off).

Last "patch" was in early May of this year (2022). Last "hotfix" was in late May of this year (2022).

...Also, bugs aside, why the heck does it take SO LONG to unlock staff members? Managing a shelter gets incredibly difficult on your own VERY quickly if you don't set the time of day speed to the slowest setting possible (and then set it to that AGAIN every time it decides to reset itself, which it does very frequently), and outside of that it's just incredibly tedious. Keeping a small shelter isn't really an option either if you don't want a bunch of neglected dogs stuck in your holding kennel or don't want to have to euthanize/"send away" a ton of 'em. I could be wrong, but I played recently so I'm fairly confident to say that I think staff is literally unlocked by the LAST section of the mayor's questline. Why, though? What's the point? Shelters are not realistically run by one singular person for THAT long! Especially not if they're getting adopters/rescued dogs coming in so, SO frequently. And mind you this is all on the lowest difficulty settings (after a while anyways) -- largely because I wanted to see if it made an obvious difference (the time settings make a VERY big difference but that's kinda it from what I can tell).

Another gripe I have that's not related to bugs/glitches, albeit much more minor: you can't skip the mayor's questline in a new save. Actually, you can't skip any interactions/cutscenes with the mayor at all. It's basically a tutorial questline and while, yes, you get some money for it, it also bars off a LOT of functionality that would be VERY USEFUL to get access to from the start. Beyond that, there's just the simple annoyance of how slow the dialogue moves; you can only click through the dialogue bubbles so fast, lol. Sometimes you have to wait anyways because you have to watch the characters walk to and from the parking lot or whatever, even if they are finished speaking for the moment.

Anyways, really can't recommend the game until the developers decide to fix a good chunk of those bugs -- preferably in a remotely timely manner. Some QoL updates in regards to skipping cutscenes/long dialogue (especially dialogue with "unique visitors" where the time KEEPS TICKING AS YOU TALK WITH THEM) would be nice, too...

I cannot and will not ever support a dev like this (look up stuff on the development team if you need; I won’t be going into that here). But that aside, since reviews of course have to involve the game in some fashion, it’s just flat out boring and lackluster, even for an early access game. Wait for much, much more development, first.

The game has some lag issues -- notoriously in multiplayer but sometimes in singleplayer as well. Last I heard, iirc, the devs basically gave up on trying to fix multiplayer or how it's practically unplayable for many (mainly due to lag). Pretty much all of my hours in the game are in singleplayer, which can quickly get repetitive and boring. Mind you I tend to have quite a few hours in games I may not particularly care for if I'm desperate enough to find something good in the game, lol. There's definitely a few hours in that total where I was just idling.

Some enemies are ridiculously easy (can be stunlocked with a stick), while some are extremely difficult, even with good armor, weapons, and skills. Speaking of weapons and skills, combat is really NOT all it cracks itself up to be in the store description. The most fun you'll get is with the higher-level skills you can acquire (eventually), and those often cost a ton of mana to even use once (unless you're going down the magic tree and really hammering in that mana regen skill, mana also takes quite a while to regenerate if you don't have healing items for it).

Controls are OK. The UI isn't great. The art style doesn't often mesh well, in a sense (this is much more nitpicky, and I'm not entirely sure how to describe it, but the art style likes to sort of give the illusion that it uses a few "really big pixels" -- quotes since that's not a real thing, but bear with me -- rather than a bunch of smaller ones bunched together; the animations completely ignore this illusion, however, and are often simply attached to the main body of the character or graphic, so it looks super weird (ie the arm for the sword swing animation breaks the illusion but is still attached to the otherwise "normal" main body during the animation)). The game has plenty of content for a measly $9, but a lot of it honestly feels kinda falsely advertised (which is an opinion and not meant in a legal way in this context) and poorly done in many aspects. I wouldn't expect anyone I know to play this for more than a few hours.

I played this game back when it was still in beta as a browser game and boy has it improved. As an already great game back then, it acquired massive updates as it was moved to Steam and is definitely worth the money. The team behind the game are great, respectable and kind people, and the game receives pretty regular updates. There are few bugs that are rarely encountered and the game continues to open up many new in-game oppurtunities and ways to play as it's developed. It can only get better as time goes on!