Recent reviews by flashwitt

(12 hours in: ) Fun, friendly, sweet, and cozy game, and free to play. There's a cash shop, but only for cosmetics. (Really nice cosmetics!) It doesn't really play like any other game I've played, though I've heard it resembles Stardew Valley and Animal Crossing- I haven't played either, so I couldn't compare. The graphics are lovely though, and my only criticism would be the semi-unorthodox move mechanics. WASD isn't THAT strange, but having an MMO that doesn't allow mouse-movement is pretty unusual, and if you're like me and thousands of others, being forced to use wasd could be anything from a mild irritant to a complete game-breaker. (In the case of certain disabilities.)
(Update, after playing for hundreds of hours:) Ignore the haters. This game is really, really good. It's truly cooperative, non-competitive, and the player base is mostly non-toxic. (There's always gonna be an @sshat in any crowd, of course.) But the most stunning, standout difference to other games, imho, is that resources don't depreciate with leveling. I'm crafting end-game level at this point, but I still need the humble ingredients, like copper and clay. It seems like a trivial thing, but it keeps everyone playing the same game, whether they're a newcomer, or an old hand, and since resources are (almost entirely) shared in game, (ie; when you mine a node, it's still there for someone else to mine after you,) there's no cutthroat competition for those low-level resources. I've always hated how, in most MMOs, once you level up, low level resources become worthless to you. Like, Whether I'm 12 or 50 years old, lemonade is still made of lemons and water and sugar, and everybody loves lemonade, even if some folks like to add seltzer, or gin, or grenadine. They've also just added a "loyalty club", that lets the mostly-free players have an inexpensive way of gaining game shop currency, so we don't have to be left out completely from the cash shop fun. It's not free, but it's affordable. Hundreds of hours in, and all my thumbs are still up for Palia!

As a cheap little game, overall, it could be worse, but it's got enough flaws that I can't really recommend. It's *extremely* linear, forcing you to run tutorial crafting quests to level up, but not allowing you to learn any other crafts along the way. My first thought was, well, now that I see how crafting works, it'll stop force-hand-holding, but nope! It continues in that way until you hit a little bottleneck at level 3: It gives you limited weapons, and the fighting skill of "stand there and hit and be hit until one of you falls down", and tells you to go murder goblins for a certain amount of coins to level up. Goblins are weaker than you, but they travel in packs of three, and also, they have BEARS. If you get mobbed by 3 goblins, and/or a bear, you die, and drop some of your stuff. You can't go learn to fight better, or make better weapons, or weave protective clothing out of palm fronds... You just have to keep fighting goblins and then dying to bears and gangs until RNG favors you with enough coins. Hint: RNG is not generous. Then there's the day/night cycles. Day is fine, night is literally stumbling blind, so you quickly learn to build fires and stay put. Unfortunately, its day/night cycle is about every 5 minutes. Conceptually, this game is fine, but the actual mechanics of the game? Pretty terrible. Add to all that a janky camera that keeps swinging itself into top-down and limiting your range of vision unless you force it to stay in place by pulling against your mouse, which is a good way to get (or aggravate,) carpel tunnles. I'd say, save your 6 or 8 or 10 bucks for something better.

Not bad for a teaser/demo chapter. Very creepy vibes, simple movement. In a few cases, you're expected to take actions which it's not clear are available to you, so you really have to experiment, but that's not a bad thing, just frustrating if you're not expecting it.

Neat little game which could be a lot neater with some fairly simple improvements. This is a case where a bit of judicial modding would definitely come in handy.

Pros: Gorgeous art design, nice soundtrack. The water effects are really stunning, and lend a lot to this game's atmosphere and mechanics. Exploration's fun, and there's a decent amount of variety in the exploration.

Cons: Can't rebind the keys, and especially in water navigation, the WASD binding becomes really tedious. There's also moments where the camera becomes locked, and cannot be mouse-turned, which makes WASD even more egregious. The combat's clunky, again, because of the forced bindings. Once you've built your first sail, you may find as I did that while paddling is slower, it's also much more reliable and less complicated.

Beyond that, simple quality of life adjustments would be nice: length of days, stamina degradation (which is entirely too fast, and leaves you spending far too much time just hunting for food.) At times, basic and essential resources become entirely too scarce. (Can't build a fire without long grass... which is slow to respawn, for example.)

Overall, if you're patient with it's flaws, I feel it's worth a few bucks, and a few hours of your time.

There are 100 fish. No more, no less. One level. Took about 10 minutes to complete. Would have liked to at least see an end-game pop of some kind, but nope. No "You Win!" no "The End" No credit roll... Bit disappointing. Still, for less than a buck, I can't say I was misled.

There's good and bad. First- it's addictive- which could be good OR bad, depending on your preference. The good: It's a fun, cute, colorful resource management/farming game, with adorable sounds, music, and animations. Travel's interesting, mechanics are pretty decent, and there's fishing. What's any game, without fishing?! The bad: The writing. Some of the characters have interesting dialogue, but the game just throws you into a character who's in a VERY strange circumstance, with zero explanation, and expects her to do things just because she's told to, with the only real motivations for the player being exploring the map, and the dopamine hit of succeeding at things. It was VERY hard to push myself beyond the opening, "Welp, I guess this is what we're doing now..." But once I did, I found it was an enjoyable and as I said- addictive- little game.

Honestly, after only playing for a handful of hours, and watching/reading up, I'd say it's a very mixed bag. If you're hyper-competitive, you might enjoy the hardcore pvp... or you might be annoyed by the somewhat pay-to-win gold shop. If you're NOT hyper-competitive, you might LOATHE the hardcore pvp, but you probably won't care about the gold shop. It's creative and interesting to play, certainly, though the rumors about the chat spew seem to be mostly true: It's a pretty endless stream of meaningless sewage. But the gameplay so far has been very enjoyable, (I don't love click-to-move... but I'm adjusting.) I mean... it's free.

I've only played a bit so far, (nice little time filler!) pleasant art and music, game mechanic is a bit Carcasonne and a bit Dorfromantik, but a lot more relaxed and freeform than either of those. I might complain that there's very little to explain how everything works, but the game is very intuitive, and the little hovertexts are informative without being intrusive at all. Totally worth the price of *free*... maybe worth even a little more than that!

Pretty decent game, if you like fishing games.
Seems like it could benefit from a few improvements, like better rebind options, a slightly *less* realistic underwater cam... (staring at bait on an otherwise black screen for long minutes isn't precisely thrilling.)
The build up of leveling can be frustrating, but taking it out in Creative mode gives you a chance to play with the bigger gear and fish, though it's not quite as satisfying when you land something.

Although the character models are clunky, at best, this game's vision of Middle Earth is otherwise absolutely stunning. I definitely do NOT recommend this one for anyone looking for a glossy, fast-paced AAA cutting edge experience. But if you're a Tolkien fan, or a roleplay fan, or just enjoy a vast, deeply immersive world, then you should absolutely give LotRO a go.