Recent reviews by The Guardian Fox

Playing solo, the early game is too stressful to be fun. It's pulling you in a hundred directions all at the same time, you're constantly juggling resource gathering needs, crafting needs, survival needs, inventory management, research progress, and a shark that will not leave you alone for 5 seconds. And where other survival games let you tackle these at a forgivable pace, this game has a need for you to do everything everywhere all at once... because it seems to be balanced exclusively for more players than just one.

I feel like the shark attacks are the biggest thing that make this experience so frustrating. If you don't start attacking the shark the instant it attacks you're GOING to lose part of your boat, and this happens CONSTANTLY, eating away at your resources and your hard work every few minutes. And if you have anything built on that corner of your raft, that's gone too, causing you to need to build your raft in a cramped manner, and adding to the pressure of letting your raft expansion eat resource that would be better placed elsewhere.

This needs tuning so bad in solo play, and I have no idea why it isn't adjusted more. Early game as a solo player should not have constant shark attacks to deal with on top of everything else you're already trying to get going. And that's kind of the theme of the problems I have throughout. It doesn't ramp in difficulty, you start with nothing, needing everything, and the game throws even more on top of you, and it can only strike me as poorly designed for solo play.

There should be a ramping difficulty in solo, less frequent attacks, and when the shark does attack, knocking it off in 2 hits would be so much better. If they want to ramp this up to make upgrades to feel better later, then ramp it up later.... the early game feels so bad because you're constantly struggling to do anything, and dealing with setbacks the whole time because it's impossible to juggle everything the game wants you to do, and yet the game insists on throwing even more at you.

Seagulls, likewise, won't leave your crops alone, and maybe you could craft a scarecrow if you could get any time freed up to do anything beyond just trying to stay alive and keep your boat together. Or the resources to do so, if you could explore islands without fear your boat randomly drifting off and leaving you stuck.

Crafting an anchor is a huge resource dump, and it's ONE TIME USE. WHO THOUGHT THIS WAS A GOOD IDEA!? Again, it feels like they want to feel later upgrades to feel good, but it comes at the expense of horrible gamefeel in the early game, to the point that you feel better off lodging your boat against islands rather than dumping resources into an object you'll use ONCE. And because you don't have another player to warn you if the boat drifts off, you get more unecessary stress added, yet again.

Simply put, this game was not balanced for solo play. There are multiple things that need to be done constantly, all at the same time, and even with 2 or 3 people I can see it feeling like you don't have room to breath in the early game... This is compounded several times as a solo player, and it's just not fun.

I still see a game that could be fun with several other players, and maybe when you get to a point where your raft doesn't suck and you have tools to deal with the shark and fend off the gulls, it wouldn't be so stressful solo.

But I could not recommend this to anyone who is interested in solo play unless they're ready for the hurt. It is absolutely not fun starting out alone, the game was simply not balanced for that AT ALL, and the difficulty options do not have enough selections to make the early game better without nerfing the whole rest of the experience. As someone that enjoys difficult games, what's left here as a solo player is not the fun kind of difficulty, it's just bad game design.

I don't think it would take many tweaks to make the solo experience early game soooo much better, and I'm left confused at why small tweaks weren't made to account for playing alone. As stated before, less shark and gull attacks alone, and an easier time dealing with the shark when it does attack, would do so much to making the early experience not feel so overwhelming. Then if another player hops in, the difficulty could adapt appropriately... many games do this, and maybe this game does as well, but if it does, it doesn't do it enough.

The best thing about this game is that it's a true roleplaying experience, that didn't shy away from the fantastic roots of turn based combat for tiktok brained zoomers.

The worst thing about this game is that the content almost feels endless! I'm still in act 1! SEND HELP!

Already really good, and there's soooo much room for it to grow into something truly amazing.

One of those ideas so perfect you wonder how it took this long to happen.

Free and fantastic.

Why aren't you playing already?

The framework of a good game is here, especially some nice card art and a solid foundation for the core gameplay, but it's really not great yet. I can't recommend jumping in until we see if the game will get good updates at a solid pace during EA.

My concern is that the dev(s) could be a bit in over their head. The current experience is very shallow, and I have a hunch that the shopper AI is extremely simplistic. There are some basic things the game doesn't have, and I can't help but wonder how experienced the team behind it is.

For example, for every card that you want to sell that's over $1 in value you have to set them individually on card stands, one by one to sell them. It's extremely tedious with a very low return. Then cards $1 and under, you can only bundle in 100 card boxes that sell for around $10. Why am I selling 100 $1 cards for $10 again...?

Building things like a functioning card game is a lot more complex and intricate than anything that's in this game right now IMO, and I can be a bit cynical about games in early access. I think most should wait to buy this until there's enough proof that the devs will get to features like that before they move on from it.

Godot's leadership can't be trusted to make good decisions with this engine, and that's why I currently can't recommend it.

Don't let Godot leadership or some tiny fraction of a community fool you into thinking this is about LGBT hate. Months ago there was a pro-LGBT tweet that had not one single negative comment to it.

This is about a community manager(s) that went on a power trip when they didn't get the response they wanted from calling Godot 'woke', banning and filtering tons of people for literally no good reason. Trying to gatekeep the godot community based on their own personal bias, weaponizing the chip on their shoulder against people displaying nothing more than common sense, and having no repercussions for those actions whatsoever.

Meanwhile leadership at godot attempt to shape this as something it's not, and control the narrative by limiting replies and removing comments. There was no 'wave of harassment', like they're trying to make you believe. You can go look at the hidden replies and see that for yourself. Most of them range from literally nothing, to just people taking issue with the CM taking it on themselves to brand Godot as 'woke' at one of the worst possible times to do that.

They literally filtered out someone for just saying 'I'm glad godot is open source'. That's the whole point of Godot. This isn't an 'accident', like they're trying to shape it. This was someone losing control, and misdirecting their anger. Someone that should not be the front face of your company.

If this is the results of the people in charge of this engine, they are acting in direct contradiction with everything Godot is supposed to be. What I believed it to be. Thus I can not support it, and do not recommend it.

It's Rivals, baby!

I miss the days of buying a game and owning a lot of content from that purchase. The monetization in this game is asinine.

Edit: I think it should be clarified, for people that got into this game 3 years ago and got a dripfeed of DLC, I can see how it would feel different to them. But coming into the game now, with $35 of mainline content and what feels like 4/5 of the game behind a paywall, with no option to bundle or 'complete edition' or anything, plus a lot of microtransactions and a SUBSCRIPTION SERVICE, the monetization has that mobile game garbage feel that I really can not tolerate.