Recent reviews by CraneSong

This really is an example of "less is more." What is this game? You fish, you sell fish, you get upgrades, you fish better. That's it, that's the gameplay loop.

But it's somehow managed to be so charming that I have spent 11 hours across 3 days fishing with my friends. We have done chalk drawings, people have learned the (surprisingly in-depth) guitar-playing system, we have placed realistically-sized whales into our comically small aquarium, and gotten far more than $5 worth of joy out of this $5 game. An easy recommendation.

Arrowhead is a developer that deeply cares about their game and their community, and the game is good fun.

I didn't hear about this game until the day before Early Access, but boy am I glad it came onto my radar. This is like a nice mix of Pulsar and Deep Rock Galactic- 2-4 people on a large ship doing independent tasks to finish a mission, while borrowing heavily from Deep Rock Galactic's style of quests. There is a hub, you launch on individual quests consisting of 1-3 objectives with random modifiers, then you come back and do it all again. Can you play solo? Technically yes, but practically no. The pilot has no weapons of their own so at the very least you will want two people.

Cosmetics are rewarded based on the missions in loot boxes, and while the starter ones make it difficult to differentiate between new players, you very quickly find color palettes and face icons to stand out. It's been lots of fun so far and the launch has honestly been very smooth. I look forward to what the devs have in store for us down the line.

Game good. It's very cute, probably best described as "Animal Crossing but Australian, meets Stardew with a splash of Minecraft." There is some rough spots that could do with a little polish like dialogue- it's made by one guy and it shows in some places- but nothing game breaking so far. The worst I've had was one of the NPCs somehow decided that they worked on my farm, watered my crops, and refused to go back to their store so that I could buy stuff from them lmao- but that was fixed by a restart, and was triggered by me moving their store. (I have also had to restart the game sometimes to get critters and bugs to spawn again after enough time. If I had to guess, their AI makes them run from you so over time they like... all wander off into the sea, rofl.)

The gameplay loop is like Animal Crossing- you're putting together a town on a currently empty island and need to befriend visitors to get them to move to the island, slowly increasing the amount of amenities. Time passes more quickly like Stardew, but you don't automatically pass out at 2am thank god because that drives me insane. (You just have your stamina reduced to something like 5% capacity, but you can still run back to your house or do things that require no stamina.) While there are furniture and clothing stores (as well as being rewards for the Animal Crossing-like quests, "Man, I'm craving an Apple. Can you give me an Apple? Thanks, m8."), the emphasis is largely on crafting. Recipes are gotten either through quest rewards ("Could you catch me a Huntsman? You can usually find them in the Bushlands this time of year.") or by reaching milestone levels in different gathering types and buying new licenses. (Using a "Nook Points" system, daily goal and achievement rewards.) Combat is fairly simple- you hit it until it's dead- and there are very few hostile critters. Lots of ambient ones though- and they're another source of revenue, you can capture them with traps and send them off to be researched. Also has your usual mine-based gameplay, one procedural map per trip instead of multiple floors you have to gauntlet down.

As for how much gameplay there is, I have 40 hours- time has gotten to mid-Winter (starts on Summer day 1), my museum is 80% complete, I am missing at least 3 shops (out of 10-ish), have at least 1 house upgrade left, and still have a few licenses left to buy. I have access to low- and mid-tier land and water vehicles. Farming is by far my lowest skill, since that's the only literal timegated one. (Seeds are a separate store from the general store, and it takes time for crops to grow ofc. Farming is 17 compared to Mining at like 47.) I also am still making my town look baller.

Overall a satisfying cute, chill game, with a fair price tag at $20. 10/10, would be set on fire by a Tasmanian devil again. (Note: I can't speak for co-op, though it sounds like it only progresses the main quests for one person- so it's ultimately their island.)

TL;DR: 7/10. It has promise, but the game's current content is its community.Your mileage will vary.

Like most survival games, this game is made by the community you play with. If you are someone who wants to log onto a public server, then you will run into hackers, griefers, and a rabid fight for the throne. Some people like that kind of community, I do not. Luckily, I play with friends on a private server where we have a loose set of rules (eg. don't attack without reason, respect the area around everyone's bases, etc) and I'm digging it so far.

The customization of appearence leaves something to be desired (hopefully to be fixed by female models and maybe future armor/dyes), but I'm impressed by how the voxel-based construction works. As long as you place down an "initial" block and build off of that, you can deal with clipping terrain- something that a lot of other survival structure-building games struggle with. It is also easy to remove blocks within your crest as you build (something, again, that a lot of buildings struggle with) so if you make a mistake or decide to move a wall out a few blocks, it's easy to do. Sometimes too easy, I've more than once accidentally made a window! A toggle option would be useful, as a quality of life tweak, but it's nothing major.

I have not experienced a lot of combat, only really facing AI enemies. Larger prey animals are, I feel, sufficiently hard to kill while ducks you can pretty much walk up to and bop on the head. Enemies such as wolves and bears sometimes have strange pathing, losing agro on you to run off somewhere else. The AI in general is a bit odd in places, running off cliffs or into the water to attack you from the riverbed (they have not grasped the concept of swimming yet).

The resource ceiling is fairly low at the moment. Once you get iron tools, weapons, and armor (steel is a very small step up), there isn't much else for you to do aside from build. There are some rare drops from mobs such as livers, diamonds, and 'tears of the gods' but not too much comes from them. I'd be interested to see more a use of these tears (rather than a, as of now, defunct item) or for the plague village to have more of an impact, through items or some other reward.

Glitches happen, as it *is* an alpha. Items will sometimes disappear from workbench output slots (Client-side, so you can get a buddy to grab it. Though, for some reason, you can then only pick them up one at a time... Maybe an ID issue.), phsyics will sometimes eat you and spit you back up toward the sky, balista sometimes will not recognize your commands, etc. Some items seem to have been removed due to bugs, which while better than leaving them in the game leaves a bit to be desired. Some more in-house testing could definitely help but, overall, for its stage in development its issues are fairly smoothed out.

Hunger/thirst seem like unneeded mechanics, hunger moreso than thirst. Pretty much within your first in-game week you have established yourself well enough to, as long as you don't neglect it entirely, manage those stats well enough. Energy is again strange, you can sprint for incredibly long distances but jumping will devour it. As long as you're not bunny hopping everywhere, you'll be fine. Fishing seems pretty much useless, I've spent about an hour trying to catch something to no avail. It could be user error, though. The health system is interesting but confusing at first, and a few tweaks to its UI could be considerable help.

Best way I can describe it is the survival of Rust combined with the building of Minecraft. If you have friends who are interested and you can game privately, then I'd definitely recommend it. If you're looking to play on a public server, or alone, I'd wait a bit longer or do a bit more research. It's not for everybody, and I can see how people can get burnt out by lack of content. Right now the content is the community, and your mileage will vary.