Recent reviews by firestarw

Fun little speedy ball platformer. It's level design is meant more for precision time trials, something that is not quite my cup of tea but I enjoyed a first run through all the levels anyways. The core movement feels great as the bouncy gooey blob. The game has an insane amount of variety, mixing things up every level and including bonus levels with completely different gimmicks. One level was even a more open ended type of level which I enjoyed much more. There are also some extra things to find in levels including reskins that can be freely swapped between at any time (and one is a bee!), and little dudes to find. A well put together complete package, but a shorter game if you don't intend on optimizing your times.

Basically, you walk around and try to figure out how to keep walking around by spawning a billion things on screen, for 30 minutes at a time.

Art is Super Dumpy looking though.

First thing I must say is that I played the Next Fest Demo 6 months+ away from launch and the movement with a controller felt bad, you could tell it was made for keyboard first. However, the final release greatly improved the feel of movement, to where precise jumps that felt impossible in the demo were intuitive in the final version. Huge props to the Dev for overhauling the movement.

Why would I emphasis movement immediately in this review? Because this is a 3D platformer where you want to both move quickly and precisely though the Mario 3D World and 3D Sonic Style levels this game contains. The game pulls this off well, and you have optional collectables in the form of letters to nab, which gain you a true ending and lore on what the games scenario actually is. I think the presentation of the story is done well, letting you figure out whats happening as you get all the collectables, especially since the demo didn't show any of the narrative. Personally I didn't care for the crane collecting in levels, even as someone who likes getting notes in Banjo Kazooie. They are too numerous to want to keep track of perhaps, at least the first time playing. The level design feels like it flip flops between a more standard platforming style, more mario 3d world esque, and a more sonic adventure style, with mostly boost pads and rails in the level. I slightly preferred the former style but the game's length makes both feel fresh. It is funny to see the sonic elements as they were not present in the demo at all. Speaking of the demo bring back the animal crossing leaf.....

Only downsides I can give the game are
1. Weird stutter when turning the camera (YMMV)
2. Hitbox on the rails could be bigger, its kinda hard to snap to them.
3. Nitpicky, but the alternate characters could have their own lore pickups to add to the narrative of their game.

A fun, cute, but short and hollow critter collecting adventure. If this game was priced a bit higher I would be more peeved at this but I think the ratio is fine. The way you catch critters is mostly a bit simple, just search around and find them. The world appears to be a minecraft style infinite world but is actually just wrapping around, which is very clever and one of the best parts of the game. As someone that played the demo, I had hoped other biomes (which were not in the demo, only basic grassland) would have more creatures like the spider that require more creativity to capture. Pokemon Snap N64 style puzzle solving to catch some critters would have gone a LONG way in making the gameplay better. There are collectable "lore" bottles, not to give too much away, that just appear, you don't really have to search for them which is a shame. But upon reading these notes you'll realize gameplay wasn't the most paramount when designing this game. The Narrative is clever. There is some achievement hunting stuff which gives the game a tad bit more of that needed depth. And it has a bee in it which auto gives it a positive rating.

An engrossing roguelite that is great if you like having to carefully time how much you mine(craft) in order to not get eaten alive. Feeds the need to get upgrades, and making progress is satisfying. Pixel art is charming. (I love Drilbert)
Personally, not the most replayable compared to some others in the genre, but the runs that do matter are very satisfying to complete. Endless mode may be more of your bag, but I preferred the specific objective mode. Most build options are worth weighing against each other, but the currently (Nov 2022) the two weapon choices are kinda imbalanced with sword feeling way more fun and strong. Despite these weaknesses, game still good enough as-is.

Nice compact roguelite. Autobattler where movement and unit rotation matter. It's fun to try and make an OP group to battle with.
Game structure seems a little restrictive though, as the game wants you to use very specific unit Synergies to have a fighting chance.

TLDR: It's kindof a Bee Minecraft game. Open World Survival Craft in structure, particularly with the base building and item collecting and farming aspects, and some light exploration. There's not really any survival since you can't die, unless you count making money.

If you like collecting things or progressing in survival craft games this ones for you. Liken this to getting all the animals in Minecraft and progressing from wood to iron tools.

Will be updating this review once Solitary Bees/Butterflies update occurs and I've played multiplayer. So current review is for singleplayer only.

More Depth and Random Bulletpoints:
APICO does really well in the collection aspect, has a great early and mid game structure, but the experience gets very repetitive and starts to lack depth toward the end.

The guidebook works as nice "campaign" to progress you through the game and get acquainted with the many systems.
Early on you will find you will need SO MUCH WOOD. Not sure if I really find it an issue or not.
Towards the endgame you'll be focused purely on unlocking new bees. These conditions feel very samey, and the way you figure out how to unlock the bees is all the same, given through the book. More bees you find in the world in odd ways, like the Frozen Jurassic bees, or other things in the world that lead to bees or quests that lead to bee recipes would have been nice mixups.
Exploring is only relevant for a short part of the game right after you get the boat, after which most players will simply take what they find back to their main base, and never move from their base again.
Speaking of quests, this game could probably have used these the most. Random NPCs could give you quests to do, which would unlock a new bee recipe (yes I'm calling hybrids that), item, open an area that has a new bee, etc. The questboard that is in the game leaves much to be desired, while it does give you some interesting things to do you would never do otherwise, only 1 out of three of the rewards, Skipper's, are interesting.

Basebuilding is fun in this game in terms of placing "workbench" type items, basically stuff that performs specific actions like a crafting table. There's a ton of these types of items that all tie into each other and you will spend 69% of the game sitting in menus siphoning stuff from one "workbench" to another, and absolutely loving it.

The game isn't all just bees, there's also Flower farming which is something you'll have to manage, since you'll need to consume certain flowers to get certain bees or bee products. I built a whole farming area for it but it's actually not that much of a roadblock, you almost nearly can ignore the flower management aspect of the game which I don't think is the best.

Graphics: Decorative basebuilding wasn't my thing in this game, I think that's half my preference (prefer decorating full 3D bases) and half an issue with the game. There's a small selection of decorative blocks and modifiers like paint seem not to differentiate enough. I think partially the fact that the graphics are the weakest thing in the game doesn't help, and there's not enough space to do more creative things ala minecraft for the other direction graphically. To continue on the graphics point, I do think this game would be instantly better if it had more detailed and cutesy bee art, although the biology diagram bees in this game are very fitting as well, maybee there could be a middle ground of those styles?

Sound: Good! Music is very fitting, most songs are kinda ambient in a Minecraft way. I also can't get the Fox tune out of my head and think of it as one of the theme songs of the game.

If you want to see first reactions from the beta test: https://youtu.be/xjEon4zkBw4

A short turn based dungeon crawler thingy with a sprawling map to try and extract every goodie from. Try the demo and see if it's your thing, it's of the first area.

Core gameplay element from this that stuck with me is that every action feels permanent, for example, every health potion you use is one less in existence in the game, etc. However it's not quite as brutal in practice as that may sound, it finds the perfect sweetspot where you do need carefully consider every turn or move, but you still have some room to make fast or suboptimal plays. Level design feels reminiscent of a metroidvania with several paths to go and interconnected areas.
Not super replayable, at most you may try to do a no death and no savescumming run after you play the first time, but the ride is pretty enjoyable!

This is a pretty good "1 hour at a time" sort of game, that is also simultaneously not very replayable and very replayable in how it feels.

If you like the idea of playing a shorter open world game (20-25 hours) that features a lot of collecting resources and items to craft upgrades and items, somewhat like Far Cry and Survival games, and has a uniqueness factor in the 5 animal factions and their villages to ally/take over, then this is a game to check out. Finding your favorite animal (it's going to be Fexels, the fox tribe), allying and trading with them, and taking over the other villages and gaining mad loot from the corpses is one of the best things about the game.


The world itself you explore is ok, mostly just a bit lacking in density of interesting locations. Combat is not the strongest point of the game (It’s “Souls-Like”). You aren't going to find dungeons or boss fights. "No two playthroughs are the same" -type mechanics exist, some of which are fun like animal village interactions, and some which may limit your mileage with the game. This is the type of game where you’ll want to leave map markers for things, but there’s only one type of map marker, no other icons so it’s hard to keep track of.

The major issues I noticed it has are bugs frequently interfering with game progress/flow (I had to re-do a village raid three times), a large amount of mechanics existing but not having depth, and a lack of interesting movement options around the world. The game waits until the very end to explain it’s most interesting things, as well as let you explore all the way. It is obvious to see that it is an indie studios first outing as a developer. One may want to buy this on a slight discount. On a better note, updates seem to have improved things looking at older reviews, so keep those patch notes in mind.

I ran this game on my i9 9900K , RTX 2060 PC running Ubuntu 20.04. The Linux version of the game ran just fine. Performance-wise the game would not go above 60 fps on the highest settings (with Anti Aliasing off), this game has optimization issues like other Open World Unity games I’ve seen. I was able to get it to hover around 70-90 fps by turning things down a few unity presets, which wasn’t noticeably different visually, but you won’t be able to get good looking 144hz if that’s what you’re after. There aren’t too many graphics settings to tweak but there is more in the settings menu than just the unity graphics presets.

I would say a controller with gyro aim (like Switch or PS4 controller) is my preference for this game, with gyro simply being for bow aiming, due to third person perspective and platforming emphasis.
You may want to change one of the default binds (game has full kb+m and controller bind menus) on the controller, the bind to use the items you get later in the game is on the dpad left , which is hard to use in combat and on the field, I personally made x this bind ,and moved the default bind for x, swap weapon, to the left stick button (L3). The default bind for L3, crouch, was then moved to dpad left, since crouching is not relevant in this game.

Side note to devs: If you made a mode that was just building up an animal faction and helping them take over the world (and prevent the others from doing so) I would pop-off.