As Far As The Eye

良い雰囲気でゆるく楽しめそうを求めている人にはおすすめしません。 ゲームの雰囲気はとても良いと思います。ただ、私はゲームが下手なのでキャンペーン（チュートリアル）すらもクリアが難しく、5つあるうちの4つ目のキャンペーンで躓いてしまいました。 チュートリアルの導き方が中途半端なのでプレイでミスこともあり、1度ミスってしまうと最初からになってしまうのはやる気が無くなります。ゲームの導入となるキャンペーンが不親切なのは良くないので改善すべき点です。

The last game I've been immersed in, is As Far As The Eye, which is a French turnbased strategy game about resource management and rougelike survival. I have spent 48 hours in this game, and here are the things I would change with it. I would ensure that there are no tiles of the game that are only accessible if your pupil has the 'walk-on-water' trait. Right now, the game occasionally spawns maps with tiles that are are completely inaccessible unless there is the microscopic chance you have someone on a very small team with the ability to walk on water, where the lakes surround these tiles in a way so that they render them completely useless to the play through. This is not well tuned, an alternative is making the walk on water trait an additional trait that is much more frequent, but ideally I'd change it so that the maps have code that ensure these blocked of tiles that make the game look broken do not occur. Because what if the exact resources I need are on those inaccessible tiles? All the maps are automatically generated, so I understand it's not a matter of editing existing maps, but something that requires a code solution. As for the finetuning, the game is very hard, there are a lot of things that need to be tuned in this game especially in the higher levels. I would ensure that there are no situations where there is a copious amount of resources that needs to be collected in the higher levels when the resources are not available. To win my last round I was asked to (in addition to other goals) get 1400 spices, where 600 spices were available to harvest on the map. And yes there are additional ways of getting spiced there is a small chance you find 50 spices in a cave, that a passerby caravan lowers the goal with a quarter, or that you use the market place to trade for the additional resources, but the best exchange rate manageable is still 12 wood for 1 spice, or 6 rock for 1 spice. With the limited amount of time that the game gives you to complete the goal, getting a requirement that high, when the map is that inhospitable is not reasonable. I can't be expected to arrive at the map with 800 spices in my pocket, on top of everything else, when I don't even know what the requirements to pass are going to be for reaching the Eye. As for map changes, I would also ensure that the map before the Eye (the final boss level map) can never be a canyon (a map entirely or close to devoid of wood), it just heightens the difficulty level to such a high degree when there isn't even wood around to build buildings out of, and it is also required in all cooking. I mean I can see the point of having canyons earlier, you have to arrive at a map with lots of wood in your pocket, but having them as the final step is just to set up the player for failure and I don't think it's fair. The later stops are also hidden from the player so I don't know if the last level is going to be a canyon until much later in the game when I'm invested in the journey. There are eight goals in the game, four short journeys to the eye from each of the compass directions, and four long journeys to the eye from each of the compass directions. I completed the first set of four short journeys from each of the compass directions, North and East were very hard, I barely made it through at all, but after many attempts I made it. I've completed the West long journey, and I think I can win the South long journey too. But from where I'm standing the last two long journeys are completely unwinnable. South is entirely luck based, there are random catastrophic events that happen much more often than in any of the other seasons - this is the challenge. But the catastrophic events are so harsh, that it's practically impossible to keep buildings standing with how often they are damaged by lightning strikes, and fires, and flooding, and wind damage, and mountain rubble. The catastrophic events need to become milder in severity if they're going to happen that often. Just taking a few damage points off would go a long way. Or there needs to be another benefit that can compensate in the progressing towards the goal, like perhaps it could be made so that they don't eat as much as the other tribes? Right now there is simply not time enough to fix all the building, work towards the goals, and keep everyone fed at the same time. All in all it's a great game, I love that each time I go back to it, the maps are different, and that I need to adapt my player style for all of the different tribes, but it still could use some more polishing to become a truly gratifying experience that rewards the player's effort, and gives them honest chances to win. Right now, the randomly generated maps feature is very cool, but it steers the direction of the game a bit too much, it needs more guard rails in order to let the game become the most optimal version of itself that it can be.