Beepski
Матвій   Ukraine
 
 
Game designer

Worked on:
- Biomutant GEN9 port :Cherrytop:
- Biomutant Switch port :happystar2022:
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36 Hours played
I bought this game exclusively for co-op with my wife, so all 10 hours I played only in multiplayer and I will do the review from this point of view.

I was attracted by the setting with various races, magic, as well as good pixel graphics and the most important thing is that it is not early access.
I love Harvest Moon games, of course I've been comparing this game to it and to Stardew Valley all the time, but in this review I'm not going to compare, I'm just going to give my observations.

I will do it in the most convenient "advantages-disadvantages" format:

Advantages:
+ The game does not force you to do anything, all timers that I have met so far are optional quests from the bulletin board, which you are given several days to complete.
+ No energy, you can cut down as many trees as you want.
+ You can change the time during which the game day passes at any moment. This is very convenient if you don't have enough time to do all the tasks in a day, or you want to skip several days quickly.
+ There are settings for shared or separate money with other players.
+ A wide selection of races, each with its own peculiarity, in addition to appearance.
+ Transparent and clear leveling of skills and talents: you get experience for any action in each of the professions, you can do anything and level what you like. All professions bring equal profit. All talents in professions have a direct impact on the game.
+ Fast enough leveling.
+ There is a main quest with good rewards.
+ A variety of decor, both for the house and for the character. Although I have not yet come across purely decorative things for character.
+ Various equipment for the farm, all more or less useful and some even unique to this game.
+ Very cool drawn large creatures, beautiful character portraits.
+ Nice animations of little things like waves around the float, or stars from crops when using fertilizer.
+ An interesting approach to mines.
+ Several cities! As many as three cities, the first is the starting one, and the other two must be opened.
+ Variety of attacking spells.

Disadvantages:
- Too few hairstyle options.

- Helmets on elemental race do not hide the hair. Its just sitting ON the hair. Looking ugly and weird AF.

- I've been running with fireball for 10 hours and I'm very disappointed with its animation from the first cast. It is flat, consists of TWO frames (in which only the position of the tail changes from left to right) and when it hits an enemy, there is no visual effect, no explosions or sparks, the mob just jumps in place, taking damage, or dies, and fireball just disappears.
You can also add other spells here, such as restoring 20 mana with an elemental race - when you cast nothing happens at all, your character simply raises his hands and you restore 20 mana. You could add the same beautiful stars as from the fertilizer, let them rise in a spiral around the character when he raises his hands - this is enough to feel that you did something at all.
Add more frames to the animations of the spells, add more shades and halftones to them, so that they look deeper, more voluminous, fit it into the surrounding world better - add some path from the red-hot fire that falls to the ground behind the flying fireball and quickly dissolves in the air or leaves a black burnt path that also disappears after a second. It's not enough to just make a flat illumination around the spell and assume that it won't look like just a paper sticker.

This is not just my desire, such things are very important, especially in the case of elemental's mana recovery, when it is not visible at all. They are important because of the feeling of influence on the world, EVERY action of the player, every input should be reflected in the game, and be very noticeable and beautiful.
I don't feel like I'm killing a crab when I throw that kind of fireball, I'd feel the same way if I just hit a button and take a bunch of HP off of it. And when restoring mana once every 10 minutes, I simply add 20 mana to myself with the press of a button, as a program, and not as a magical elemental. This is disappointing.

- Too much free space of the same color on the ground. It's visible better or worse in different places, but if you simply clean your entire yard on the farm, or just look at some screens right here in Steam, you can see that the land consists of a solid color, on which "islands" of grass, dirt, stones, etc can be visible. These islands look good in small locations, but in large spaces they are located at a distance of 100,000 km from each other, and because of this, every item on such land looks detached from the surface. Add more life to the ground, worms, bugs, flowers. Just for surrounding to look more lively and beautiful, not for interaction purposes, it will make you want to come back to the game and remember it for the long time.

- There are a lot of flaws in the multiplayer. It looks as if authors haven't planned to make the game cooperative from the very beginning, but added this feature at the last moment. I haven't been following the development, maybe it wasn't meant to be cooperative, but it feels very much like it.
For example if an NPC came to one of you and triggered a cutscene, and the other player does not have this NPC yet, then you will see how your friend's character just stands there and looks at the wall. You won't see any NPCs or a camera icon above your friend's character to let you know that he is currently watching a cutscene.
It's the same with scripted battles - if one of you fights an enemy on a quest that the other doesn't have, all you'll see is your partner just swinging a sword in the air. It breaks the immersion, looks cheap.
Also pests that come to your farm - you have to "fight" them, such mini-bosses with mini-games, but the fact is that if one of the players of this drove away the pest, then it does not disappear in another, but remains until he himself also defeats it. It's even more rewarding, but looks stupid. There should not be such a thing that one player sees something that has not yet appeared in another, or has already disappeared, this creates many questions, bugs and, again, breaks the immersion.
There are quite a lot of such things, it all needs to be tested and cleaned.

- In my opinion, some craft is too long. I'm talking about seed extractor or seed maker, I don't remember what it's called exactly. It makes 2 seeds from 1 vegetable or fruit in 48 game hours - this is nothing, because you need to plant at least 30 vegetables to get any significant profit. Of course, you can buy seeds, but then what is the point of this device if you still have to buy a lot.
You can also put many of these seed extractors, but it all takes up a lot of space and a lot of wood. Okay, let it be a fee for being completely independent of seed sellers, but there is still one last drawback to this - when I put 20 seed extractors, I have to periodically run around them all to load with other vegetables.
If you think about it this way, the process of sowing, harvesting, watering and weeding the beds is the same, but this process can be automated with saplings and accessories, but the process of loading 20 extractors with new vegetables cannot.

- In the future, I would like to see more portraits of NPCs, not only those with whom you can start a romance.



I hope that the developers will listen to these tips and at least somehow improve the animations and land tiles, because as you can see, these are generally the only things that left a bad impression after this game.
I highly recommend it if you love Harvest Moon and Stardew Valley like I do.