Cereal Soup

I miss the game! All it needed was good advertising to get a good player base set up, it had a lot of potential Sell the game to someone who will continue it!

PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE BRING BACK THE SERVERS!!!!!

There's too much to say about this game, so I'm just going to summaries everything best as I can for it's "end". I may become a bit mean at some points in this review, but this game was so deeply rooted in my younger years that seeing the actions of the developer especially with the announcement of the game's end, I just have some things I'd like to say as my own sort of "goodbye". I would like to think that I was one of the first wave of people to download and play this game way back in 2016, and through it I met my to this day best friends. I would spend countless hours everyday here just sitting and chatting with people and making silly little characters and stories. The game had so much potential at the beginning, so much so it was being compared with "Feral Heart" (Which to this day I know barely anything about, just that it was more popular). I genuinely loved this game to bits despite it being a "furry" game, and met so many lovely people and will cherish those memories forever. However, all good things come to an end, and this game was no different. I don't remember the exact timeline of events, but the owner/developer, Blackie, became hyper aggressive towards the mods and her own player base. At one point she removed and banned the ENTIRE mod team because she wanted to do things all by herself and solo, so any of her "I'm so tired of doing things alone" is completely bullsh*t because she actively removed anyone who wanted to help. Because it was early in development, the servers capped at 100 people and would have constant times where you had to wait to be able to enter the game, essentially it was flooding with traffic. To help handle this many people, the game was set up in different regions that acted as their own hubs, where players were able to travel between them with loading screens. This was perfect for people, as many of the players at the time were using laptops and cheaper devices. However, through wanting to change the game's core charm, the developer decided to combine every single map into one giant one, and it became unplayable. Even to this day with a well built PC that can run triple A games at 60fps with no issues struggles to run whatever this game is. It's optimisation is abysmal and though the last time I played prior this review was roughly a year or so ago, I have no doubt it still runs extremely poorly. The map is large, dark, and empty. The old maps each had their own themes, shapes, and character, but now it's all just a mess that leaves players just wanting to sit at the main spawn point and go no further. Speaking of players, thats our next issue. At the game's beginning, with mods and all, the community was one of the best out there. No matter what, you could join into anyone's conversations and at times everyone was talking with one another in the global chat. Everyone was extremely nice and the chat was well moderated, meaning anything even remotely offensive or over sexual would get shut down immediately. So, when every mod was not only removed but BANNED, you can imagine the state of the chat afterwards. With the map combination, I would like to say a good 97% of the already diminishing fans (that were already leaving because the negativity Blackie was spreading was becoming too well known and seen) stopped playing all together. The then overfull server that had a waiting list just to log in was now down to averaging 10 players max, before ultimately becoming 0 players altogether. If you were lucky to find online players that weren't afk growing, then you'd be met with ego and attitude. Trying to talk to anyone would just lead them to get mad at you for "interrupting their conversation" in the global chat, and in general the aggressive levels of the players (especially those who managed to become sort of "Friendly" with Blackie in the game's discord server"). One of the cool (at the time) features of the game was where if you were to draw fanart, Blackie would potentially add it to the games loading screen with your permission. However, Blackie gets so easily aggravated by questions that when people started asking about the drawing that my friend did, Blackie went to said friend, told them they're extremely annoyed by all the questions about the art that they were removing it and would at that point onward never include any of their art again. This same annoyance was seen when a popular and unique rare feature in the game (Gigantism and Dwarfism) was ultimately removed from being attainable. However, even with all this, when I first saw the steam post of Blackie quitting the game production, I did feel bad. It isn't easy making a game, and especially one that had such a sudden and harsh downfall as this one, but what took any of that sympathy away was a recent event in which Blackie decided as a way to celebrate the game one final time, for everyone to log into the game at the same time for a short while, share their creations and characters, take some screenshots, and that would be when it closes for good. I personally wasn't able to attend this event as it was at 6:00am on a work day, however my friends were. Did Blackie show up? No. Did she make any sort of comment on it on discord? No. No thanks, no goodbye, and as of now the game is still downloadable and playable. When you're grasping at getting sympathy points, it's probably a good idea to actually follow through with whatever you're saying. Although I stopped properly playing this game way back when the players began to fall off extremely fast, I never really stopped following it's development. I remember on the forums people were excitedly talking about the future of the game, with the introduction of quests, trading, NPCs, collecting, and even pvp and "hunting". The then sit around and talk game was finally becoming something you could actually invest some work in! So, whatever happened with that? Nothing. Those features may be in the game, yeah, but do they work at all? No. Not at all. I don't think a single thing in this game works properly, not the character customisation or the animations or the environments or any of the in game systems. Even something as important as being able to make "clans" and groups in general in a game where roleplaying is ever present broke years ago and was never fixed. For being in development for this long, you'd expect the game to have any sort of content, but it doesn't. You log in, forced to play the default creature until you unlock the other animals (unless this was changed but my next points still stand), are forced to grow from a baby to an adult (which leaves players just sitting afk), and then that's it. You can try talking to people if they're online, but you'll either get no response or essentially told to "piss off". There's nothing to do in this game, as nothing that was added even works. The game's development has pretty much diminished to nothing, with updates releasing months apart. Animals such as horses and deer and other mystical beings were planned to be added as playable creatures, but in 2016, it took a year or so just to release the fourth animal type, raptors or "birds". These raptors were planned to release relatively quickly, but they never were, and instead were only released after the game was practically dead, which saw a rise in players for about a day or so while people tried them out, but that quickly stopped. TL;DR, game was at it's peak in 2016/2017 with it's bright and beautiful community. Owner became aggressive and self obsessed, removing and banning all moderators because she wanted control over everything. Bad game design decisions later, the then overfull game servers went down to 0 players. Owner plays victim and wants sympathy points. Don't bother playing the game, you aren't going to find many people anyways, and if you do, they'll probably just refuse to talk to you anyways. Not even nostalgia is going to prevent me from reviewing this game truthfully.