Recent reviews by impracticalJocker

Maybe this is due to simple thumbs up - thumbs down -- "you should play this game" vs "you should not play this game" rating system, but even then I would not recommend this game be played.

I have followed this game for some time, noting that it looked fun and cool a year ago, at which point it already had stellar reviews. I have no idea how these reviews came about because in playing the game I can't find a single unique feature or even one that is better executed than in other games, which are wrapped up in an tedious and joyless user experience.

I understand the game is in early access, but basic settings are missing. There is no borderless mode, which is the standard in this era of gaming, the clunky keybinds are unable to be remapped, it's a base-building game with no procedural generation, and from the main menu to the game screen, the UI is uninspired, flat and bland. The UI doesn't even include typical features for automation games such as rates of production/consumption, so it's unnecessarily complicated to apply JIT manufacturing or even set a target for surplus and efficiency.

In terms of gameplay, there is absolutely nothing special here, and quite a few oversights. Your goal is to build a sprawling, growing beaver-topia, but have no planning capabilities other than placing and deleting objects. On that note, the deleting is tedious at best and excruciating most of the time. Depending on the type of object, you may have to click it, and then click a trash bin in its menu (or press del) and then click yes (or press enter). This three step process must be done unit by unit. Whether it's a large warehouse, or a single tile of the path that all buildings must connect to, or one unit of carrot fields out of the hundred you have on a single farm, you must delete them one at a time. There is actually a deconstruction tool that will instantly destroy anything you highlight with it. And when you do get a set up you like, you can not copy it to a different area, so don't even try to make a modular and efficiently expanding base.

The last gameplay point I will touch on is how dumb the AI and pathing is. Beavers can only do one job at a time, and will sit around if unemployed. The problem arises when you realize that the buildings the beavers work in stop working entirely when the beaver goes to deposit the building's products in a storage area. The unemployed beaver won't even work as a hauler. Productivity grinds to a halt periodically so an employee can make a few trips to the stockpile. And if you store the products nearby, then workplaces that use that product have to come from all over to pick that up to use AT THEIR OWN WORKPLACE (or construction site) before making their product and then bringing it to that product's storage facility. This is incredibly frustrating because it forces you to build huge surpluses of productive buildings just so that there is output being made consistently rather than on-off for these pick up/deposit trips.

There are a host of other mess ups in this game like the confusing ad-hoc research system, the unclear water-flow mechanics (which dictate your power production), a baffling inability to reassign workers or change their lodging to one closer to their workplace, and a mystifying main building that cannot be moved, while using up two workers for unknown reasons.

This game oversimplifies a genre that is meant to be complex so that players can make individual solutions that best solve the issues in their situations how they like to solve problems, and it lacks the most basic quality of life settings and features that make building nation-sized industrial areas fun, or at least non-aggravating of carpal tunnel syndrome.

You would be much more satisfied playing Factorio and/or Rimworld.

5/7

This I one of the best games I have ever played. The base game has great story and the modding community for this game is fantastic. I highly recommend mods for this game as they can vastly expand interest and give the player even more directions besides the main questline. This game is amazing!

Too difficult.
I saw this game and I noticed how beautifu it was an how diffrent it was. It was nice. You can be so many diffrent things, with armor, weapons and the birds you find. The potions are cool too. But this game is really, REALLY hard. If you die you have to start from the very begining of this long game and then you have to use the weird controls to pick your "father" all over again. It would be nice if it could remember which "father" you selected last and when you died it started off with that one highlighted and ready for you to press the s button on to select it. Being an amateur programmer who will probably never be as good at programming a Alastair john Jack is, it would be pretty simple to implement this. Maybe not now after so much has been done to this game already, but yeah. But I actually really like this game and it is beautiful in audio, visuals and creativiy. I love the style and entire games of Alastair John Jack but this game is really just too difficult. I know it would make the game really easy with checkpoints but right now it is. Great job on this game AJJ, and I never meant to to put him down at all in this review, I am just speaking my mind. Great game, high difficulty.