Recent reviews by canis39

Loving this game in 2024; wishing I had tried it sooner. To me it seems like a spiritual successor to Railroad Tycoon 3 -- an economy simulator as well as a computerized model train set. It's challenging to figure out the best train routes, it's enjoyable to lay the track and place buildings, and it's fun to watch the trains run and the cities grow.

This game is really something special. It offers a fun, compelling story... that you can ignore for hours at a time. It lets you float around the ocean depths pretty leisurely (okay, there is an occasional shark to be defeated or avoided)... but then it interrupts you at just the right time with a new gameplay mechanic or a new way to make money or an adorable side mission or a fun mini-game.

I don't know that I've ever played a non-turn-based game that had more of a "one more turn" feeling. "One more dive, then I'll go to bed" I say to myself every night... and then 2 hours later I've done 4 more dives, checked my fish farm, completed a side quest, unlocked a new recipe at the sushi restaurant, and met a new character.

This is also probably my favorite pixel graphics game. I am not typically a fan -- I lived through the 80s and 90s when bad graphics were all we had; why would I want to intentionally go back to bad graphics? But the art style in this game is just about perfect.

The characters and writing are also great.

I don't know what else to say -- try this game. I don't think it's for absolutely everyone... but man, if it clicks with you, I think you will freaking love it.

This game has some fun elements, to be sure. In Steam’s binary YES or NO system, I say YES. But my numerical score is about 6/10.

The graphics are fine for this type of game. Certainly more appealing than Stardew’s pixels, for me. The animals are very cute, and most of the items in the world are nicely rendered. The sound design is pretty good – all of the action sounds are well done, and the music doesn’t get annoying for a while.

I found the tutorial to be a bit overbearing – so many clicks! – but it did its job of teaching me the basics of how to play.

The cutscene in the beginning is skippable, which is definitely a plus if you want to restart to try a different character. And speaking of characters, there are several customization options – in addition to your character, you can rename your property on the island, as well as the name of the town and the region. That’s a nice touch. For the character itself, you can change skin, hair, eyes, and gender. Gender is required and it’s either male or female – a choice which seems a bit out of touch with the world we live in, and out of sync with the look of the character, which is decidedly non-gender-specific).

A couple of quality of life items. First, a positive: pausing the game does actually stop time from passing, which is nice. If I have to step away from the keyboard for a minute, I like to come back where I left off. Second, a big negative: the user interface is just a jumbled mess. So many tabs, with hardly any information as to what you’re looking at or how it might be useful. The map is not too useful either, since there is only one level of zoom.

Now on to the gameplay –

I was initially impressed with the lack of invisible walls. The game suggested that I should follow a certain path to get to my house, but several other paths were also available. Unfortunately this turned out to be misleading. There are absolutely invisible walls in the game, and they are often arbitrary and always annoying.

Crafting is pretty simple: gather the ingredients, press the button, wait for the item to be completed. There are plenty of craftables to keep you busy, including food items that can be cooked on a stove. (Cooking is a specific type of crafting but works the same way). One very nice thing is that crafting does not require that the ingredients are in your personal inventory. You can craft using any items in any of your storage chests. (And you will have LOTS of storage chests). One downside is that some of the recipes seem a bit inconsistent – you might need a high-level ingredient in order to craft a low-level item.

A word about storage – there are not many storage slots in your personal backpack, or in the smaller chests… but each slot is stackable, so you can have 829 carrots or 732 iron ingots in a single slot. (I didn’t ever get past 999 of anything so I don’t know if that’s the hard cap but that would be my guess).

Building is similar to crafting, with an annoying twist: the ingredients must be in your personal inventory, so you either have to remember which chest has which items, or you have to check every single chest until you find what you need.

Exploration and resource gathering is what you will spend most of your time doing. It’s fun at first… but you soon realize that there isn’t a ton of variety in the environments. There are a bunch of different islands to explore, but I have yet to find one that really stands out as being noteworthy.

The social aspect of the game is disappointing. First, the town is just far enough away from your homestead to make every trip annoying. Also, the dialogue choices for your character are almost always two positive/optimistic and one negative/pessimistic, and the two positive are nearly identical. So for example, someone will say “I really like fishing! Do you like fishing?” and your choices for response will be (A) “Yes, I love fishing! What’s your favorite fish to catch?” (B) “I do like fishing, along with other activities. What’s your favorite thing about it?” and (C) “I hate fishing, it’s really boring and dumb. I don’t understand why anyone would like it.” The writing for the NPCs isn’t much better. I never found myself truly intrigued to see what anyone had to say. I was interacting with people because I had to, in order to level up my “social” ability. Most days I forget to even visit the town, unless I am short on cash and need to sell items to the trader.

The main story involves your character’s mysterious background. It’s… sort of interesting, I guess? But so far I am happy enough to ignore it so I could focus on exploring and crafting.

Bottom line: the developers are very active, and seem committed to updating and improving the game. If you’re done with Stardew and Portia and need a new option in the life-farm-social-sim genre, you could certainly do worse than this. But don’t pay full price, wait for a sale.

A wonderful combination: building, crafting, combat, survival, exploration. Highly recommended.

It's not perfect... but it's awesome, and it's worth full price if you're a fan of baseball games on the PC. They added batting practice and pitching practice, and there are lots of other ways to play (exhibition, season, franchise, and a bunch of online options.

Definitely recommended.

If you're into making custom teams, it's even better -- there's a great range of customization options.

My son says that this game is awesome, and you have to try it.

I'd agree -- if you're looking to build cool vehicles and then actually drive/fly them around, this is a great game. The multiplayer servers have a wide variety of games available -- from strict roleplaying to killing zombies to WWII battles.

One of the best digital recreations of a board game I've ever seen. The wonderful artwork literally comes alive, and the gameplay is absolutely faithful to the board game. If you're a fan of the Tokaido board game, you owe it to yourself to grab the digital edition.

This game is a great way to turn off your brain and have fun for 45 minutes at a time. It does a great job of making you feel the speed and the curves and the height of your jumps.

Absolutely recommended. If you're on the fence but you think it looks pretty fun, go for it -- it's a really fun game.

Here's the bottom line. This expansion is worth the money. It adds a ton of new species, new tanks, new items, new campaign missions, and of course the new breeding mechanic. And all of it is awesome.

Not to mention, this is one of the best developers in the business, his attention to detail and customer-centric approach makes him worthy of support.

If you own the game, you won't be disappointed with this expansion.

I read a ton of bad reviews from 2018, but I decided to take a chance on this game anyway... and I'm really glad I did.

For single player offline play, I highly recommend it.

The career mode is great. The points feel real. The matches feel real. There's some training sessions, and a ton of skills and equipment to unlock and upgrade.

As I write this the game is part of the latest Humble Bundle, so you can grab this game plus a bunch of others for less than 5 USD.