TL;DR: Doloc Town is a fantastic and unique entry to the cozy farming genre. Buy it!
The sidescrolling perspective already lends visual interest; and the post-apocalyptic setting is more than a unique aesthetic, it offers alternative crafting recipes for many necessities and additional ways to forage for basic resources. Basic garbage foraging remains a useful source of common resources like Iron and Rubber well into the midgame, and the key component for generators and some advanced machines is primarily obtained from junk. Circling back to the sidescrolling, though, it's genuinely satisfying to build vertically and create ramshackle stacks of machines atop skeletal scaffolding, leaving you with a mess of tangled platforms and a dense cluster of machines. Yet you still have the ability to create neat, orderly rows just in the game's top-down brethren. Stacking shipping containers atop one another is only available here, though!
The aesthetic and setting aren't all that sets Doloc Town apart. The traditional mines are replaced with actual levels to explore, complete with light platforming and well-hidden secrets galore! I've actually been excited to go get more resources because instead of a mindless grind, it's another opportunity to look for hidden passages and push the boundaries of my previous discoveries! Beyond that, there are other subtler mechanical differences that keep Doloc Town feeling fresh and new despite the fact that I've played Stardew Valley twice over and only just had my fill of Fields of Mistria. All machines and building are recyclable for their input materials, and farm automation is available surprisingly early (though scaling it gets costly at that point).
Thus far, I only have two real complaints about Doloc Town. The one I most brush up against is that there's surprisingly little online documentation for the game, so it's often very difficult to look up any information. Figuring out where/when to catch certain fish, or what the purpose is of a yet-to-be-unlocked building, can be a nightmare. The main online resource is a Chinese fan wiki, but my Firefox has been real fickle about translating it, and the extensions I've used have been annoying. (This is probably user error). Piggybacking on this, the minor quibble I have with the game is that some of the in-game translation is slightly awkward, or uses unconventional phrasing. For example, the "pickles" requested in a particular quest are not, in fact, pickled cucumbers, but pickled CABBAGE. This is easily inferred because the same quest demands cabbages, but this is one example of many.
