I would have zero problems recommending this game if it was in Early Access. In its current state, I can’t really recommend it, and I am writing my first ever review to try to make sure people have what I consider to be necessary information before deciding whether or not to buy.
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[*]When you accept a customer mission, the game kicks you out of the Mission tab and back to the game, where you have to click to remove the client-specific dialogue text that repeats after you accept every single mission. If you want to continue to accept more missions, you must go back into the Mission tab and repeat the process.
[*][b]Unlike in the demo[/b], your quest/mission objectives are only displayed one at a time, at the top left of the UI. If you want the necessary details of a specific quest/mission (and you don’t physically write them all down somewhere, which I resorted to doing at around 23 active missions), you have to cycle through them one by one. Something that I feel adds insult to injury is that you can see a list of available/accepted missions (main story objectives not included), but the included dialogue is purely flavor text. None of it tells you what you actually need to make/do to complete the mission!
[*]You can't sort your inventory or crafting recipes.
[*]You can’t search your inventory or crafting recipes, and the recipes at crafting stations all get dumped (possibly at random, regardless of when they were acquired) into the same unorganized, non-alphabetized list.
[*]The way they designed automated/bulk crafting is very annoying (bordering on infuriating). There is a separate, dedicated inventory that you have to dump components into (it doesn’t pull from your personal inventory), and there’s no master list or anything to tell you what all you need to dump in there based on what you’ve queued up. What you have to do is mouse over each recipe in the queue so you can see what you need to make ONE item, then do the math yourself and get everything together. I suppose you could also pin a recipe, do the math, write down the quantities you need, gather and dump the components, queue it up for production, and then keep doing that in turn for each batch of items you need to automate.
[*] The above issue might not even be as frustrating if it weren’t for the fact that you come to a point, relatively early on, where the missions call for recipes that can only be crafted using the automation queue. Such recipes can’t be viewed or crafted using the workbench, even if you only need one of each item.
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Other things that could potentially affect your enjoyment of the game:
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[*]If you want/need to use a controller, you'll have to rely on Steam input (meaning no button prompts).
[*]No key re-binding in the options menu.
[*]When you complete missions to craft and sell furniture, the same customer-specific dialogue pop-ups repeat after each submission, and they need to be acknowledged before you can move on.
[*]In some instances, it’s possible to meet the requirements of a story quest and have the quest objective change from “have specified item in your inventory” to something like “go give it to so and so”. The objective doesn’t change back to what you need to make/acquire if you no longer have the necessary items in your inventory (like if you sold them for another mission), so you might have to go back to the quest-giver to see what you need to give them.
[*]You can only pin one recipe at a time.
[*]In my opinion, a lot of the humor is very "how do you do, fellow kids?" (occasionally in what some might call an “edgy” way that feels forced to me).
[*]They’re trying very hard to make the story “weird”/wacky. You can tell because they mention how “weird” the game is in some of the dialogue and item descriptions. (I generally enjoy fourth-wall breaking, amusing item descriptions, absurd scenarios, and whatnot, but I think they just need better writing.)
[*]The translations are mostly okay, but there are a few where it can be hard to tell what they meant.
[*]You may occasionally want to put something back on the ground where it belongs (trying to avoid potential mild spoilers), but dropping/placing things is impossible.
[*]If you want to consume something, you have to switch it to your hand, consume it, and then find your axe in the inventory so you can re-equip it (I assume the temporary boost timer is still running while this is happening).
[*]There are objects that you can create for missions that will be automatically equipped to your hand, so you have to go looking for your axe in the inventory to re-equip it.
[*]You can’t go back to the main menu from the Load Save menu without loading a save or force quitting the game (I have heard they are working on this, but how does that go overlooked in the first place?).
[*]There’s no toggle to run.
[*]The game could really use an item magnet feature for small pieces of wood and other objects that you’re forced to pick up by running over them. Especially because the wood from split tree trumps tends to go flying relatively far from you, and the lighting in some areas can make it hard to see objects on the ground. (You can kind of limit how far small pieces of wood fly by quickly splitting the stump before the tree falls, but it doesn’t always help.)
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I have heard that the developers are nice on Discord, and they’re apparently responsive and working to fix bugs/issues that people point out, but I don’t think that’s enough of a reason for so many people to seemingly ignore or gloss over so many glaring design issues in a non-Early-Access game.
I promise I am literally not joking or trying to be mean when I say that it feels like this game was made by someone who doesn't personally play games at all (and possibly hasn’t played any since the ‘80s or ‘90s, if ever), but they had some ideas they thought would be fun/cool if they were featured in a game. (Like how you have to hit fast-travel doors on the little doorbell’s hit box to open them, which gets old pretty quick.) I think a lot of issues could have been prevented if they at least played their own game prior to release, which I have to assume never happened, because they would have had to realize how aggravating some of their design choices are from the player’s perspective.
I really like the premise of the game, and I very much enjoy the exploration and building a furniture business when I’m not being annoyed (and sometimes enraged) by the issues I’ve mentioned. But if I had known that some things would be as rough as (if not worse than) in the demo, I definitely would have waited for things to be improved before buying the game.
