Recent reviews by irish_vampyre

So I wavered on whether to leave a positive or negative review. Ultimately the game is pretty meh across the board. What tipped the scale for me personally was the cost. Even for $10 this game just isn't delivering. I got it on sale for around $3.80 or so in December, 2024, and for that price it's very fair. I'd price this game at about $5.

Here is why:

- Not enough moving parts. You can choose a mechanic genre and a topical genre, a system to release on, and once you unlock the option you can choose your custom engine that you spend an ungodly amount of money to put options you already spent an ungodly amount of money researching together, and when you build the game they simply unlock and cost you even more to use... Even though YOU researched it, YOU built the engine, and YOU are developing the game and have to pay any staff you have separately. Rather than adding parts together and assembling a game and making choices on developing your game what you get instead is sliders in 3 stages and you have to guess at how high to set them. USUALLY it's going to be 100/80/0 or 100/0/0 and there's very little deviation past a certain point. So you basically just put a few rough-hewn legos to put together to build a giant die and then you roll it to see how randomly well you did with very, very little control.

- False Starts. So about your 3rd-5th game you'll find you suddenly get a huge, random success and you'll start to believe that you're figuring out the game. You're not, it's scripted to get you to move into the office. You'll generate around $2m and it'll be gone before you know it if you choose to move. If you instead choose to stay and pave a proper path to that office you'll be bugged by the move to the office message every 5 min. You are probably not ready.

- Intrusive Messages and Progress Delays. So you'll want to be somewhat careful about doing contracts too close to your monthly expenses because if you have to pay your bills your character takes a few days to rub his head and stall your progress. ACTUALLY manage to pull off a contract in the last seconds? No you didn't, the generated progress point has to travel to the goal bubble or it doesn't count. On a role and focused? Better hope no one comes out with a new console ever couple minutes or you'll lose your focus in the constant, slow, and annoying news that needs to be in your face. Rather than just having a little side scroll notice and a way to check the news if you care it's game freezing popups with the slowest text printing you've seen since Pokemon Red and Blue.

- No Skills or Progression. So speaking of not having any control over anything... Want to have some idea or minigame on how to make faster progress or else to add things to a game to maybe make it perform better? NO! BAD GAMER! You only get to pull the arm on a slot machine! THAT IS ALL YOU DESERVE! I am very annoyed over this one because it's a simulator game but this is really more of a casual gambling game set up as a Game Dev Simulator. I am not kidding. There's ways to train up certain skills but to no degree of usefulness. This isn't the game for you if you want a strong hand in your own success besides memorizing matches and traits. Frankly, Huniepop is more complex and deamnds more from you and it's a match-3 adult anime game.

Honestly there's more to winge about but at the end of the day the game just misses the mark in a LOT of strong and important ways. HOWEVER, if you can pick it up for $5 or less you'll be getting about what you payed for. It's nothing special and nothing crazy but it's a little fun, at least while you stay in the garage, and you'll have fun moments. So as long as you know what you're getting into this is a fair purchase on sale. That's all I can really say for it.

So, ultimately the game is worth having because this is only the first step in a long journey for this game. It's not perfect but the fact that it still has a a lot in its future and there's a very good chance that the distance between the current state and "perfect" will shrink. It's a fun game. There are still some glaring issues though and before you buy the game, here's what you need to know:

1) There is No Point: You play for the challenge right now. You make a profit but there's nothing to spend that profit on but more product. There's no purchasable cosmetics, no better equipment, you don't start with nothing and buy your way into a good place to eat. There's no decorations, no repainting, you cannot place any equipment or design the interior, you can't buy any more sauce bottles or pans, or trays, or even earn personal levels and put them into a skill tree. This is my greatest struggle right now. You earn some overall levels that unlock things that feel like they should have been unlocked from day 1... Level 25 for cheese on a burger? I ask you.... BUT... That's the only real progression and reward you're going to get.

2) There is No Deep Stats: You're not going to get a break down. When you look at money on tables you'll get to see what you made overall for the meal and the tip, but the ticket will be dead and you can't see what they specifically had so you either remember and calculate or just ignore it and move on. The end of day information will give you a VERY general break down of the money you made, what you spent, what profit you had, how many customers you had and how many you perfected the order for. Honestly, there's not much more than that. You cannot see why some customers were displeased, you cannot see how many of what you used for the day, you will not be able to get a breakdown of the total tips on the day, you won't ever be able to set a price or find out what you're making per item. It is just like the progression in every way, there's very little depth so you'll just have to find happiness in what you're doing.

3) There's VERY Little Chaos: As we all know, any decent player will FIND a way to create their own chaos but if you think you're going to just throw a cabbage around, you're wrong. Want to be annoying and put a leftover cooked burger on a table? Not without a tray. Want to press the ice on the soda machine and make a slipping hazard? Not without a cup and you can only place the cup, not toss it or spill it. Certain items can ONLY GO on certain surfaces and in certain bins. There's no rel chance for mistakes and very little opportunity for chaos besides that which you explore and manufacture. So if you were looking for an element of party game with your friends, that's not going to happen, at least right now.

There's a lot more little issues and more that doesn't make sense but overall the game works, and works well. It's a fun and functional game. It's lacking some staying power, it's lacking some motivating systems, and it's missing distractions from the tedium of the gameplay that is sadly pretty bland over time. At the end of the day I paid about $13.50 for the game and I got 20 hours out of it so far. So the cost and the play are very reasonable. You are getting what you paid for and there's a potential for this game to get better and those issues to be mended and made whole. You aren't just paying for a functional game but for a future that could be genuinely great in this title.

THIS IS NOT HARRY POTTER.

So before I start my review this has to be made clear. This is just another carbon copy Action/Adventure RPG. It has no in depth or lore mechanics that distinguish it. In fact if you've played any game like Dragon Age: Inquisition or Batman: Arkham City, this is going to be just another game like those. It has a Hogwarts and Harry Potter backdrop but it goes off on its own little tangent with the lore and world building, all of the things in the world are carbon copy-pasta from one part to another. The bestiary in this game probably lauds an high count like 70-90 but in reality there's like 9 enemies that get reskinned and resized like 8 times a piece and a few uniques. Even the named enemies I have discovered so far are just replicas of lesser enemies. The spells you use are only slightly visually different with the exception of utility spells like Lumos and Repairo. There's barely even any unique information or names, nearly all of them playing up the nostalgia from books and movies. Even the castle, big as it is, is only about a 5th of the size it ought to be. You're also not playing a Hogwarts Student simulator, the castle is ultimately, just another part of the backdrop. Ultimately it comes down to the fact that there is little about the mechanics, operation, and lore than really has any value as a frontier lines game.

THAT SAID, the game is beautiful, it's interesting, the combat varied and fun enough that it doesn't get too stale, there's always new places to explore and while the puzzles become incredibly repetitive after a while, ultimately the game retains its entertainment value for at lest 50 hours, so far, in my experience. I am only just starting to feel the tugs of tedium and boredom while playing.

I have other notes regarding the lack of actual depth to the game but they contain spoilers and really just fall into the same vein of problems mentioned above. The one thing I have noticed, is sort of a spoiler but important enough to spoil anyways, and doesn't seem to be changing: There is NO Quiddich in the game. If you have good memories of FFX and Blitzball and are thinking, "At least I can have a Quiddich league and enjoy that!" No, you cannot. It's not in the game and it may affect you buying it son it has to be mentioned.

So, my rating is as follows:
Art: 8/10
Mechanics: 6/10
Story: 8/10
Interest Hold: 8/10
Creativity: 7/10

I got the game on sale for around $20. I would say that's more than a fair value. I would actually have charged this game as being a $30 value. It's not without its issues and it has a lot of things where it simply failed to achieve the desired result, it's not pushing the capabilities of games or settling new horizons on the frontier but it's a solid game with a good length of play, just know what you're getting into regarding the Harry Potter backdrop, not a Harry Potter universe game, or you'll face a lot of disappointment. Still a solid choice and I can happily recommend it, but just be warned.

Note: If you start experiencing crashes or excessive stuttering turn off cloud saving in steam, then go into your save folder in %appdata% Local\Hogwarts Legacy\Saved\SaveGames\[random numbers] and then erase everything that's not a save file, EG: HL-00-12 is a save file. Particularly, erase the SavedUserOptions the steam file, and SaveGameList. After I dumped those the game generated new ones of the files it needed and I haven't had a crash or stutter since.

Not to turn this into a novel but here's the plain and simple issue set I have. The game is pretty good and has some pretty good and fun ideas. The issue comes down to the mechanics being terrible. The win conditions are too easy and don't allow for real wing stretching. The resources are either in heavy gain or heavy loss and there's no warning or reason to it, one moment you'll be excelling at producing wood and go through winters fine and then out of nowhere you'll be at such a massive deficit that you can't do anything about it. Money in particular has no reasonable way of accumulating. Food has the same issue, one second you're at 800+ and the next you're seeing you're at 120 and dropping at -20 and you haven't changed anything. The stone and iron resources have a VERY low limit to the making gathering them barely worth the effort, especially as I don't recover all my materials. The number of villagers I get is almost too low to keep up, the building limits are so low that I am forced to overextend, and the cost to develop plots of land to up the cap is high when the money just never seems to be there. The upgrades to buildings have nightmarish costs, the upgrades don't actually provide much of a benefit, the healing is slow and often ineffectual, the teams in the 2v2 modes and such are meaningless. The only fun aspect is the bare bones idea of the game and the combat which is heavily tilted in the AI's favor.

I deeply want to like this game. I have high hopes but I feel less like I am playing a strategy game where I can fix problems and adjust needs and lot more like I am playing in an RNG-Hell. I was looking forward to wasting my whole day playing this game but about 2 hours of playing later I don't think I'll be playing again for months, if ever. Thankfully the game only cost me $3 right now and that's all I'd have paid for it if I'd known what I was getting, so thankfully that worked out.

The devs have a great opportunity in this game but the balancing and mechanics are simply not there at all.

To Start!

1 - THE GAME IS NOT SCARY

2 - The game is NOT an investigation game
3 - The game is NOT deep story-centric

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Nov - 04 - 2024

With that out of the way I'd call the game a fun, silly, and light action-adventure. The game has a lot of potential to become those things. There's a lot of potential for the game to become an epic despite the Fortnite feel of the animation, movement, and gunplay. There's no end to the potential, in fact, but it seems like they nailed the feel and mechanics they want so don't expect more out of it than that, just know that it could come to pass with the right leadership.

Pros:

- The game is fun... A LOT of fun.

- The game is relatively stable.

- There's a LOT of variety in monsters.

- There's a lot of gun variation as you go but not a choice crippling number.

- There is a pretty fun amount of story and it's reasonably interesting but fair warning that it's wall of text style and the monster WILL NOT give you time to read. Be prepared to open notes and immediately jump out to deal with an attack, then get back in to read.

- The locations are really cool and a lot of fun to explore but there's not a lot to them and the maps are good sized but not particularly large.

- Even the home base has a lot to explore, ALWAYS make sure to grab ammo, and a gun if needed, when you get back to base just in case you find... Friends...

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The Cons:

- The ATVs are absolute garbage. Half the time they don't steer well (hit something, it seems to reset them) and even when they are steering ok they tend to slide around and high speed is a bad idea as you'll be hard pressed to stop. I recommend them for macro travelling but don't rely on them too much.

- The combat is a little stale and direct by about 35% of the way through the game, it doesn't really change much. You can definitely get over this and keep going but the fighting becomes repetitive.

- The story is good but super limited and as stated above, text walls with no break from the monsters to take it in. In fact this is my biggest sore spot with the game. Some of the notes are books with like 3-5 paragraphs of story to read and you can sometimes have to fend off 2 different attacks in an effort to read it.

- Bad Maps... No mini map, bad map system, most locations don't even come with a map, you can't set way points, you can't buy markers of any kind, you don't transfer points of interest from map you find in the game onto your map. On some of the maps all you get is a big ambiguously colored square with no details, just a marker representing you and a little yellow circle pointing out where you should go next.

- Not really enough hotbar slots. You will end up with 3-5 guns you want to switch through, you'll need healing, probably 2 kinds, and you'll have one slot left for consumables, traps, throwables, devices, decoys, and so on. The game really could have done with 8-10 hotbars slots but you get 6. Unfortunate really.

- Seasonal skins are NOT added to your wardrobe but are instead added to your inventory and equipped like an item. The gas mask I get as it's a functional item (why it's not got a special button you can fast swap to I am not sure but we'll live) but why all the other stuff isn't just added into my wardrobe to equip as a simple skin item is beyond me.

- While there's a lot of talk about creature weaknesses the creatures in the game simply get a story-armor and you can't beat them until you reach the final arena. You don't have to do anything special to finish it off, any damage is final damage. Again, the combat is incredibly stale by the half way point and you likely won't even need the massive amounts of cash you get.

- There's really no kind of puzzle solving in the game. There's a few half-hearted puzzles but that's just not the kind of game this is. You are here to chew bubblegum and whoop monsters, they forgot to put bubblegum in the game so equip a gun and hop to it.

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So is the game some revelation of gaming? No. It's very mid and very simply. The game is fun though. You'll find bugs, you'll find cheese (metaphorical and little wheels of edible, healing cheese), you'll have boring moments, there's an occasional jumpscare, but, arguably the most important thing, you'll have fun.

I'd give this game a solid 7/10 for its silliness and fun, providing variety and just enough interest to keep you interested without bothering to even look into other lanes. I sincerely hope they'll give this game some love in the story, atmosphere, tension, and investigation aspects but likely this is the game they made, that they intended, and that they are happy with and that's perfectly ok too. This is a solid game and while I got it for $5 on sale at a massive bargain, at the normal cost of $10 I can't recommend this game more. Ultimately, unless someone royally screw up this game has nowhere to go but up.

So let me get this out of the way first: The game is enjoyable for a time and it's VERY kid friendly. I'd say 8-10 and up are going to get a lot of enjoyment from it. So if you're just seeking a game to plop a kid in front of and they'll just veg out on it, this is a good option. I believe it's a little pricey even for that but it will certainly do in that framework.

I will preface that though I have positive things to say first that overall this game has failed in my eyes.

Pros:

- Colorful, pretty medium sized open world.

= Great colors and patterns on the dinos.

- Some of the characters are really nice and fun to get to know.

= The concept of the game is actually pretty great, for me, I see a lot of inspiration from Stardew Valley, Ark, and almost Pokemon.

- Has a nice lean into biology and ecology that isn't present near enough in a lot of monster/dino/animal games.


Sadly, that's about where it all falls down. Even though I mention that you have those inspirations this game falls down on every side of that potential. Here's why:

Cons:

- NO crafting. There is cooking, sort of... You have to buy EVERYTHING. You have absolutely no skill beyond playing a flute so poorly that dinosaurs think you're speaking their language. You can, technically, cook. Only by using some randomly placed cooking pot with a bad minigame and it eats MASSIVE amounts of food for very little gain. Ultimately, you're at the mercy of the game's economy.

= BAD Economy... You can spam quests all day long but SURPRISE! They almost never offer money for those quests and rarely enough to actually keep you happy in terms of buying the things you'd like to beautify and and maximize the gains of, your ranch/farm/home. In fact most of the items they offer don't really scale up with your experience. Pretty much you're going to end up going through a ton of normal monetary gaining paths that you're used to and ultimately discover that you just have to work the farming system for money if you want to succeed and there'a lot of crops that are just trash. Don't worry though, none of those crops can actually be turned into food, remember the no crafting thing? Yep, go find (good luck...) or buy food for your growing circus.

- Speaking of feeding your dinos, don't worry, they messed that up too. The dinos eat an extraordinary amount of food as they get larger but you don't actually get better stats or stamina for all that, you're just going to sit on, not ride, that'll take days on end, a larger food loss for a more spacially inept creature.

= BAD RNG. I don't know how else to put this. The game has all the potential in the world for giving you ways to gather resources through the normally expected means, mining, logging, excavating, cultivation, harvesting, foraging, ranching your dinosaurs, growing on your farm... You get foraging, 99.9999% is down to terrible RNG and a little grinding on the very few resource points that are only available once per day and if you want something more than basic materials you'll again be subjected to TERRIBLE RNG... AGAIN...

- MASSIVE time sink. If you want to make sure to maximize the time you've got you're going to see a collapse of your energy, effort, and time. See above for the "Definitely a game for kids" preface I have above. Even if you do your absolute, speed runner best in this game, it'll find ways to punish you with time.

= Lack of purpose. So there's at least 30 dinos I've seen so far but there's like 8 useful attributes or uses. I have 6 dinos on my ranch and honestly when I only had 5 I had all I really needed. There's no unique attributes to a species, there's no stat options, there's no real value to leveling certain dinos or rare dinos for special upgrades or benefits. It's all just the same washed out and bland gameplay under the very pretty graphics.

= Small Map. So the map is actually a fairly decent size until you begin to get deep enough into the game that the only real reward or value to daily life is exploring and seeking RNG blessings throughout the landscape... Once you get there though you begin to realize that the map doesn't provide enough to keep those things supported.

- Shallow world building and mechanics. We get a few moments of shine when Granny talks about her family and when Pippin talks about his heritage. The journaling makes you think there's going to be a strong learning aspect of the game. You're wrong. First, the journal needlessly takes up a space in your inventory when it could just always be part of your key items, like all of the actual tools should be honestly. What you learn from wild dinos can only be learned once you put them to sleep, meaning you mindlessly waste time looking for the rare colors and patterns, because that's the only difference, and have to find out if the GAME thinks they deserve to be a rare or not, like holofoil cards in booster packs if the cards kept demanding you give a nickel to a quarter every day just to keep the card. You don't learn their diets by finding a dino eating in the wild and learning, you don't examine their leavings to learn what kind of fertilizer (which is needlessly complicated for a game with such shallow mechanics on nearly all other fronts, honestly) they might be good at producing, you don't learn about bushes, rocks, or other species they enjoy being around. If you put a dino to sleep you get to write down the thinnest of basics and that's it. Same with all of the various plants. You actually get a lot more from the plants, honestly, their season and preferred soil/fertilizer. See how that was barely 2 points? That makes it vastly more useful than the zero points you get from journaling about a dino. Even then, you'd think that the world started letting you get to know people better but that's also a no. You get to learn some history and address some minor personality development, but at the end of the day not even that is really given room to shine. None of the characters really talk about their lives, families, passions, etc... in any real depth. Even if they did you'd just be wading through endless text. Yes I am spoiled but we don't even get simply voice lines. It's all just words on a screen. Text wall after text wall with no real value added.

At the end of the day, had I known what I was getting myself into this game would have been fairly priced at $10. It's enjoyable in the short term but it has a LONG way to go before it's actually going to live up to any of the potential it has. Based on the fact that they are already locking holiday content behind paywalls, we're never going to see that happen. So while I want to believe in the future of the game and see it rise up and stand out, I don't believe that's going to happen here. This feels like it's as finished and polished as these devs are going to make it and so I can't honestly say it's worth the cost. My advice is wait for a wale to massively reduce the price of this game and then take it for a spin.

TL;DR

Pretty graphics are disguising that the game is only really worth playing for about 10 hours of slow and chill gaming with no challenge. I'd price the content at $10 - $12 and don't see a developing future ahead. Wait for a sale.


This review has been massively edited due to steam review character limits...

Very fun and simple game.

There's a lot going on for stats in this game, the actual gameplay is very simple, almost idle game simple.

Pros:

Fun setting, fun layout engineer system, moderately fun monster system, interesting tower defense scheme, and interesting progression (research) system.

Cons:

AI is TOO simplistic, the layout management isn't designer friendly (you must connect rooms to other rooms and you can't simply store items so you can create an interesting dungeon), the money gain system seems VERY slow, for some reason you're not creating a living system at all to fill loot chests and trying to only let a few select adventurers through but actually trying to create, almost, an amusement park for adventurers? Monsters level up in linear fashion and there's not a lot of customization, monster spawners have no additional delay option or a way to upgrade them with souls to lower the minimum cooldown, monsters also only level using soul currency, not individually at all. Finally, the research is based on visitors, not on your actual performance or any kind of currency you can generate by doing a good job with your dungeon. A lot of these cons end up contributing to the idle clicker feeling at times.

A note that it only took me 2.5 hours to encounter a game crashing error.

Overall, the game has a LONG way to go to truly be unique and overcome the simplistic graphics limitations, especially as this game is one where being able to see more with advanced graphics could make for epic moments. It also really needs to find itself in terms of putting more of the advancement into player performance rather than just meet a general standard and keep letting time pass. However, the concept is pure gold and there's a ton of potential here and evidence that the devs at least grasp that potential. Only time can tell but the game is relatively cheap, this is only day 1 of early access (09/25/2024), and while there's a long road to find the potential and really make something special here, we've barely set foot on the road so we have a long time to build that road.

What I will say to the devs: Create a way to get money a little faster, not something you just get for free but something based on performance, second, put some love into the layout and design system, particularly the part that caters to mid-game redesigning. Things like a storage to place your items, a room layout for copy/paste option, a way to do like the sims and use low wall vision so you don't have to go full vertical to see what's going on in the various rooms, the ability to just put rooms out in the middle of nowhere or else into above suggested storage, etc...

I do in fact recommend this game. It fills a niche that isn't really cared for in the market right now and ultimately the game is fun. At the moment I wouldn't say it's worth the $15 price tag but you're also paying for the potential of the game and if the devs keep working on this it'll reach and possibly surpass that projected potential.

The game is very average but fun.

So first let's talk about the elephant in the room. Ale and Tale. We ALL know that this game is really just a fix for the bug they put into us. At that, it falls a bit short but it'll do for now. The game is a solid:
6/10

Why? Well it's simple really. The game is VERY basic. The minigames are bland, the progression is bland, the customer models are pretty bland after the first day or two, the bar itself is preset and you don't get a lot of space for personal design or customization, there's not a lot going on outside of the tavern and what's available to do IN the tavern is bare-bones. Even the text is clearly written by a non-native English speaker because the English writing is barely passable.

That said, it can be fun for a while the speed of progression doesn't leave a huge amount of time for you to feel how limited it is, allowing it to become very stale. That said it does begin to seep in.

As of right now, I bout it on sale for about $12 and it probably should have been more like $8, but it's fine for the moment. Once Ale and Tale comes out in roughly 3 weeks I'll probably never look back but if you need a few days of fun to get you through without feeling too overwhelmed then this is a decent game.

Ultimately I recommend it but only if you know what you're buying.

The demo was a little bare bones, but it was a demo, it's to be expected. Even so the game was a ton of fun and the demo did exactly what it was supposed to, I want more, a lot more, of this game. I am sad I had to stop where I did.

I look forward to the full game's release. My only suggestion is to expand and diversify the voice cast. That is a VERY small gripe. Excellent game even as a demo.

5 hours in and here's my take away: The game is attempting to be a fusion of Valheim and Conan Exiles. It fails. It actually manages to bring together the worst of both worlds.

Inventory is very limited, resource nodes give minor amounts of resources, buildings take ungodly amounts of resources, the villagers take a huge time sink to micromanage, even with micromanaging none of the workers stay busy, you still end up doing most of the work, the tools are only about a quarter as durable as they should be, passive progression has no impact, there is no active progression, there are no progression points for distribution, storage is as limited as your inventory but on a larger scale, there pretty much is no item stacking at all, combat isn't fun, weapons and armor are a poorly integrated toolset at the best of times, everything you can think of to produce at home needs 10 times as much work as it should, from buildings to items to assigning workers to the food and water cost, to the additional housing required. Exploration is punished, staying at home and doing tedious building work so your villagers can say they have nothign to do is encouraged.

Simply, the game isn't very fun. It has a lot of potential but at the moment it feels like a slog through a ton of tedious work for absolutely no reward. It HAS to get better as time goes on, there's nowhere to go BUT up, at the moment though I don't even see how this game made it out of Alpha stage. Keep an eye on this game in case they live up to any of its potential at all but as of right now, especially for the pricetag, stay well clear of this game. I regret playing it.