Recent reviews by Riolis

more like a tech demo then a game, barely have any content

its a horrible nasty nasty game with bad everything. bad ui bad control bad game overall.

this game is in par with bad rats. Probably even worst

A nope for me.
Game have a lot of potential but the main problem is the core game play.
Mainly alot of micro managing and grinding.

Level up a tier, hey here more stuff to grind and micro manage. More steps for you to do to get this one thing.
Getting up the tech tier only helps you do things a bit faster but does not help automate any of the grind.
Run to your oil well -> run to your oil refinery -> run to your Oil cracking plant -> run to your gas generator -> run to your oil cistern -> run back to your oil well with empty canister. (repeat forever if you want energy in your base)
Just so damn tedious.

Sadly they just had to put "rare materials" in the game. RNG is not fun. Go and collect grass and see how fast you can get the seeds you wanted.

Plus, one player is able to claim up to 3 slot at mid game, so you will barely have any space left in the desired area in the swamps and deserts. Most of the good stuff is up north (coal and oil), and there's nothing useful in the south side.

It was fun running up till the mid tier, then you figured out you need to grind more ♥♥♥♥, in addition of the ♥♥♥♥ you have been grinding every time you go up a tech tier. Nope, you don't get things to be easier, just more things to grind, and the ability to grind a bit faster, so you can have more time to grind the new ♥♥♥♥ at a lower speed until you can tier up to make it faster and get more things to grind, oh hey we need to grind for GOLD now, lets grind again for them RNG.

I've always dreamt to play HM on PC ever since I played my first HM on the emulator. Those are great but you know it lacks some of the fun of playing it when they are not made for PC and unable to use your mouse. Years gone by, and the only way to get your HM fix is to own a multitude of consoles that are made by nintendo, and being someone from where nintendo device will cost upwards to a month of your full salary (or more), you had no choice to just keep on dreaming of it.

Fortunately after being burnt by tons of rpgmakers crap that are advertised as HM insipred/clone which don't even come close. This gem came out of the woodworks after being in developement for 3 years.

Note that I am only 6 hours in. And this is what I can say for that hours, I don't have enough hours to review marriage, festival, livestocks, adventure part and the other part that I might not even experienced yet.

Positive
Cutscenes and options!
In the typical HM games, Cutscenes is mostly consist of linear scripted scene, with your character as a bystander, watching as the thing plays. In Stardew, you are part of the cutscene, and you will be offered a choice and able to choose how the cutscene goes. This is effing great, as the cutscenes shows the personality of the said character, and give you a choice on how you would react to their personality.

And it seems like there is plenty of those cutscene around, maybe for every character maybe? All the NPC that I befriended with 2 hearts seems to trigger an event, and if my assumption is correct, This game is EPIC. and all of it is uniquely different and entertaining.

Farming plot
is Huge! With the great object placement system, you can make the farm as how you want it. There is nothing else to be said about it, It just great the space you have to grow and customize.

Meaningful map
Map is large, but it's well sized, and meaningful, and unlike some other game, you can auto run and IT WONT DRAIN YOUR ENERGY (which is great!). But it is not large enough that you have to spend most of your in-game hours running, when you want to go to the store or when trying to find where any NPC is. And it is small enough that you can meet up more then a few in 1 area, which make the town feels alive.

Also the areas are uniquely different from 1 area to another, which is very refreshing.

Gifts
Hearts goes up much faster, and in a meaningful way. You are not forced to spam gift every single day and after 30 days of doing it, only able to increase it by 1 heart. Give a proper present at the right time. Huge bump on the relationship meter. Meaningful!
Plus you are limited to 2 gift per person per week. Meaning you don't have to spend your time spamming gift, rather you can just choose the best gift, and only gift it anytime on that week. You can concretrate to farming, livestock, talking, exploring, adventuring, figuring out on how to make most money and such, while still have meaningful relationship with other character without grinding meaningless gift over and over again every single day. Brilliant!

Dialogs
Another thing I found refreshing is the dialog and how it is done. The NPC will only talk to you a few times and they won't talk to you anymore until tomorrow. Which make the dialog more valuable. Less is more, nay? You don't need to spam the NPC hoping to find out if there is anything new that he or she will say after increasing their relationship meter. If there anything new, he/she will say it out straight, one time and done. You can move on. No need to hear the same dialog over and over and over again.

Less spammy in every way = great game.

Negative
Fishing
I can't seem to get myself to like this clickfest of a system. The bar is way to sensitive, holding or releasing for way too long will accelerate the bar upwards or downwards. So you are stuck with clicking your mouse nonstop so that the acceleration would stop and the bar would stay in one place.

Click fest is not fun. Clicker is not fun, which is why people created auto click apps for those type of game. You have almost a zen-like feel throughout the game, and when you start to fish, the game pace changes dramatically. You don't have to click as much when you plant or water (which is a huge massive improvement from the typical HM games) why? oh why with this clicky nightmare. :(

This game is just a huge dissapointment for me.

A HM insipired game, where you can only have 10 type of crops, 2 cows and 4 chicken, and can't do anything with stuff you farmed aside from gifting, using in very limited cooking and its very limited recipe or selling it. And cooking is another pain as most of the other ingredient you need to buy and can't get it anywhere either by exploring nor crafting, so Farming AND Livestock are mainly pointless in this game unless you wanted to get achievement or progress the story-line.

A HM insipired game where, most of the time you will be spending is in the form of mining. This is where you get the most dosh, by spending time clicking Spacebar/Z non stop on rocks in this two tiered RNG nightmare. (Once when you hit the boulder and once when refinening the rocks) In this game its mining where your main income comes from, and farming/livestock is your sub income. Though neither mining nor farming is any fun to play with.

There is no depth in the gameplay, no leveling up your crops or cows/chicken, or your mining skill/chances, no fruit tree planting, no fish breeding, no bees+honey, no mushroom farming, no nothing nada. Just a very boring click fest, and an inventory that are unintuitive to use. Just a mindless boring grind with no essense to it.

Furthermore you can't even expand your barnyard or farm lot. sigh. If there is, the game sure didn't even try to tell me about it. But I guess it's probably best not to expand anyways, as the proccess of farming or caring for livestock is a HUGE PAIN, as you can't put stuff that you used the most in the quickslot, and have to use the super annoying inventory every time to grab somehting out to feed your dog/car/cow/chicken.

Another gripe I have with this game is character moves way too slowly, and running will use up your energy. The map is pointlessly bigger then it should be with nothing much interesting in between and it will take forever for you to walk from one end to another to find the NPC you want to find (which brings me to another problem, no minimap and locations of NPC), But you can get a horse you say? Sure, but you can't talk while your char is transform as a horse, you need to untransform to human, and later transform back to horse, which force you to sit there for few second every single time watching the bloody annoying fade in fade out transition. Imagine doing this a number of time while you are on your way to the town and meet up with a few NPC along the way.

The story is also very plain, and pretty much boring. The romantic interest that are presented to you also have very boring lines and very uninteresting as a character. Charming characters? Sure, there are a few, but your romatic interest are very generic and "ughh". For example, Hailey only have 1 event in the whole game, and it doesn't even shows her personality, just a very boring dialog/talk with her father. No personality at all. The story is probably better then most of the olden HM games, but unfortunately this game falls on it @sses when compared to the newer iteration of HM like HM new beginnings. Futhermore after marriage, there is nothing new your bride can provide you except for a small amount of dosh. I would rather they have more story after marriage and make all the running around to talk to her and collecting mushroom and gifting it to her worthwhile. But unfortunately it's not. Very dissapointing.

Fishing is horrible. :/

Lockball is even more horrible :/
The control is a nightmare, sure. Even then the difficulty ramp is just out of whack. Every character you played with is very easy even with the horrid control, but then when the tournament came, and you fight with Paxel, the difficulty curve just went through the roof as you will bang your keyboard non stop and flipping any table you can find in your field of view.



In summary, this game tries to do what HM do well, but falls flat in every way possible.
But two thumbs up for the character drawings. Props to the artist (Ivyree Rosario)

The game as a whole is meh.

A bugfest of a piece of an unpolished turd.

Here a sample of some of the nastiness.
- UI is just plain nasty and hard to use. If your charagter is moving you cant open any menu as it will auto close.
- Crafting thing/UI is even a bigger pain, as your inventory keep resetting and you remove stuff from your crafting menu and you have tons of items, as you will as you progress and obviously there is no bloody chance in blue hell that you can have a filter in this turd as well.
- Which brings me to another point on the inventory, newly created item is added at the bottom of you inventory, when you try to drag anything to the shop or from the stockpile, your inventory will reset itself to the top, so you need to drag the screen down (like an ipad) so you can drag another item to the shop/stockpile. Don't want to drag? Click fest.
- This game is nothing but a click fest, and it will irritates you like crazy. With the Pathfinding AI is a nasty piece of shat, you will spend most of your time cursing your character as it moves slowly away from the forge as you try to melt some iron to make a metal sheet because the bloody thing runs out of fuel and the stupid window closes and makes you click on the terrain and make your stupid character to move.
- Harvesting is also a click fest and a nightmare. Clickfest is not gameplay. That why clever people created auto-clicker for the virus turd that came from flash portal that is called the clicker games.
- AI is just plain dumb and buggy. Your AI Farmer will always keep getting stuck in a berry bush. NPC will stuck in bar for no obvious reason.
- Destroying stumps? Or Want to change your field to something else? Right click and click destroy for every single tile, and if you accidently moved, then you have to repeat right click again, AFTER your stupid char stop its slow movement. And you cant even click where your char stand FFS!
- NPC is a pain the backside to click, because obviously the dev is too lazy to implement a function that detect if the mouse click intersect with the sprite or not (which you can google in 1 sec and implement it in even less time then that) FUUUUU LAZY PEOPLE

Even people who are into bondages and S&M will raise their hands up in surrender, and say "nope, nope, NOPE! NOPE!!!! HELL NO"

Depressingly sad :(

Critique :
There is not enough deep moments and story about the husband and wife. It was enough to pull you inside, but it misses the opportunitiesto grab player heart, crush it and laugh at the player while the player broke down and cry like a baby.

The game also misses alot of chances to make the player loves/understand the wife even more by shrouding her condition in darkness, and throw away the opportunities with sentences like,

Hmm maybe she,...... nevermind.
Maybe he is, ... hmm nevermind.

and then never take the chance to rectify the problem.

I had to scrounge the forum a couple of hours to find out what she had (from a forummer who had the same condition as her), to understand her reasonings, which is sadly really immersion breaking. If the game would've spend time explaining it to the player, that would help the player to be more emotionally bond to the wife story and decisions and would've make the story even more deep.

The two main character (the scientist) is trying way too hard to be comical with the juvenile dialogs. Which reminds me of the character "Jake Peralta" in Brooklyn Nine-Nine Tv show. When things get serious or emotional, he will go NOICE! and destroy all the emotional build up. The same happens here but in more times that it should have. The game is trying way too hard to force two totally different genre together (comedy and love story) which blunts both story effectiveness.

At the end of the story, we barely learn anything about those two, their motivation, their relationships and their stories, which is really a huge missed opportunities to get the player more invested in those two story and look forward to their next adventures. The one hook at the end is not enough to make you care, the two DLCs do help, but I wish some of the story was in the main game that would make it so much better.




While there are alot of huges misses, there a plenty of huge home runs as well, which is why I had to recommend this game. The premise of this game is interesting, the back story of the husband and wife is devastatingly depressingly sad depending if you are a glass half empty type of person (and if you spend hours to understand even more about the condition in the forums)

The game would probably be massively better and have more impact on the player if its was a visual novel then made in RPGMaker (and I didn't complain about the no options, and resolution fix as its the engine problem not the game faults).


Honest verdict : 7/10
Depressingly sad :(

The small details to things like light doesn't turn off or on at the same time make this game so beautiful despite the dated texture and graphic.

Gets quite repeatative after a few games, and the control is nasty.

bestest shiz ever.

Tho emmasse can be a epick pain in the buts and a huge jackarse,

I would still wholeheartly recommend this epic time eater to my worst enemy.

By the time you realize what had happen, you will be 10 years older when you first touch this game.