APICO

Pronouns

bees

EDIT: I checked some other reviews and first things first: i am not one of those weirdos complaining cause the game has pronouns. I use they/he, as a matter of fact. And tbh this game is quite bland on the inclusion, wish they were more over the top about it, y'know like, tons of pride flags to add to my porch from the get go and stuff like this, but thats not the reason for my negative review. Lets get to it: There is a huge core problem with it that is: the UI. You know that saying "don't reinvent the wheel"? They tryed (and failed) to reinvent the wheel with that UI. Whatever the intention was with those menus, didn't work. Beekepping? Love it. Breeding species of bees and flowers and collecting everything there is? Love it. Doing everything step-by-step in their own worktables? Amazing! I love to go by each step of gathering bee-products and breeding bees and crafting more products! I love how realistic the mechanics of beeking are! I love how they mashed the realistic mechanics with an extremely simple pixelated artstyle! Even the music and everything is so cozy. But. That UI. I think it's easily the worst UI i've ever seen, and that is considering the UI *after* adjusting it in the acessibility settings - most of which are very limited and don't really do much. The adjustiments barely do anything to help with the mess of the thousands of menus all over the place. The option to pin the menus doesnt help either, cause there is not enough space on the screen to place each in a good spot, and they overlap anyway, and each menu has its own shape and size that makes it impossible to organize them in a good manner (and no way to resize them as far as im aware). Honestly, i think i spent more time battling against the multiple menus than actually playing and exploring. I even insisted and played more to see if i got used to it, but the more i played, the more and more frustrated i got, until i just gave up and closed the game. Unfortunatly, the issues of UI were enough to ruin all the good aspects of this game. I can see there is a ton of content to it and a huge map to explore and so many mechanics to discover, but i just couldn't get to them without feeling frustrated with the menus.

It really wants to be Forestry without any of the parts that made Forestry fun, and there's lame pronouns.

APICO gets a review now. Bee game. Best enjoyed on my widescreen monitor so I can have sooo many machine tabs open at once. Very glad there's automation late into the game, and the overall gentle "hey, with cogs, now your machine keeps spinning once cranked" is Very helpful as well as the first time I've seen a small boost to production in early-game go so well. Go bees. Very glad I can buy Monthense's theme music. I group this game with Minecraft, Terraria, and Stardew valley in my head for it's ability to let me live in a virtual location for a Really long time, slowly building and improving it around me. VERY GLAD THERE'S MULTIPLAYER

I just got 104% completion and all achievements in this game in about 45 hours, this game is absolutely massive. The game is about collecting and discovering many different types of bees, and each bee has its own requirements. Some bees need to be found during a snowstorm, some need to be bred near a music box, some need to be next to other hives, some need to be next to machines, some need to be next to a heater or cooler, some are grumpy and need to be calmed down with flower scenets, etc etc, there's close to 50 bees in the game and that's just counting the regular social bees, there's also flowers to collect which also have requirements, solitary bees which also are a huge puzzle, and butterflies. Also, each of these bees makes honey which you can sell or combine with water to make apicola(which you can also sell), and a special produce you can sell. Flowers also modify the behavior of bees near them, some flowers make your bees create a lot more bees, some boost productivity, some boost your chance of getting a new bee, some make your bees stay up longer into the night, etc. You can also boost these with incenses, which do things like increase your luck or the chance of bees spawning nearby. All this to say, the game has a massive amount of things to collect and a huge number of ways to optimize them, it's a great collectation. Cons: The game is unfortunately mostly waiting. Wait for bees to finish their lifecycle to spawn more bees. Wait for bees to produce more stuff with their production cycle. Wait for the woodcutter to cut the wood into planks. Wait for the flowers to grow. Wait for butterflies to spawn. Wait in a bed so it's night time so you can get that elusive night time bug. Wait, wait, wait. It's a huge amount of waiting. Also, almost through the whole entire game my inventory has been full, the game has a lot of items you need often and many of them dont stack, including bees themselves and the frames they're placed in. Also, many of game's systems need you to open many menus and do upkeep on everything, for example bees at the end of their lifecycle will stop producing and you'll need to manually press R on them to restart them, and for honey frames you need to manually move them from the apiary to the uncapper to the extractor and then back to the apiary. You eventually get to automate this, but it's almost always tedious to do. Overall, I really recommend this game but with the warning that a lot of it is just waiting for things to be done. If you can get past that, there's a lot of stuff to discover in this game.

I feel like it does what it set out to do - it's a cozy, low stakes fidget game where you get to build up your bee farms. I enjoy having it on and clicking around while talking to my friends, and knowing there's nothing I can really do to mess anything up. I think in the world of "cozy farm sims", it does a decent job, but has a lot of the common pitfalls. Mostly in terms of progression "narrative depth". Pros - cozy - simple - bees are cool - if ur a millennial, hella millennial puns - controls generally work well and you can progress without trying too hard. Cons ~~ - inventory sometimes bugs. you have to open and re-close it for it to work again. This usually doesn't matter, but I lost a $400 item from a sale because of it right before Steam prompted me for this review and I *really* considered giving it a thumbs down for that alone ~~ Editing this one: I found the item I thought I lost a small ways across the map hanging out in the forest, hidden under trees. The inventory bug does seem to be the most prevalent, but opening and closing your extended inventory (E key) seems to reset it in most scenarios. - in the beginning of the game, you unlock and progress *so fast*, its constant achievements and goals. And then it slows to a crawl, and it's not exactly clear how much time you should expect anything else forever more to take. In other games like Stardew, it was very evident if a thing you were working on was going to feel grindy or not. In this game it's much less so. - you can open a lot of menus for items, which is a pro and a con. I sometimes feel like I'm just playing a menu switcher game instead of crafting. I'm enjoying my time. I'm glad I bought it on Humble Bundle. It fits its niche and is generally pretty good.

For the price i can't recommend the game its too shallow and underbaked maybe for a third of the price it would be but the game just does not have the content that come with this price tag sad as i do think the potential was there