Snowball Beetle spawn rate so low it's in the NEGATIVES.
Early Access aside, this game is missing a bunch of features that have NOT been announced to be added in 1.0 or at a later date. So no, I'm not including things coming to 1.0 in my complaints cause that would be ridiculous. That said, let's continue with my problems so far.
- The biggest issue is that you cannot make multiple save files easily. You have to be EXTREMELY careful as saves are limited and old ones will be rewritten. There is no easy way to differentiate your saves at first glance either, unless you completely change your characters name I guess. This means if you want to marry multiple characters... good luck. You are screwed over and forced to walk a tightrope to make that work. And the more characters you want to date, the worse it will become and the higher your chance of accidentally deleting one of your "other" saves cause you didn't realize you hit the cap and boom your oldest one is gone.
- Now, if you are interested in this cause you enjoy completing collections like the museum DO NOT BUY THIS GAME. The drop rates for some items and creatures (SNOWBALL. BEETLE.) are so low you could spend almost an entire real life day trying and never see them once. Now you can wait until this season happens a full year later to do it ALL OVER AGAIN and STILL not find it. Also, the museum serves NO PURPOSE at this moment aside from giving you exclusive furniture if you finish a set. The building may exist, but the exhibits don't. It's a single boring lobby where sometimes you can catch NPCs leaving from the exhibit doors hidden behind red ribbons and wonder "how did you get in there."
- If you accidentally don't choose the dating option with a character after their 8 heart event or later change your mind and do want to date them... well you're out of luck buddy. Start a new save, cause it's impossible to fix that choice later unless you had an earlier one before it happened. There's no way to break up with a character you're dating either, so you're stuck with them. I don't know why the devs decided to lock this behind a heart event and not just tie it to a gift you give them that signifies you'd like to date after they reach 8 hearts (and vice versa for breaking up) as that's what almost every single game in the genre does but... yeah.
- Accessibility is there, but it still needs a lot of work. You may notice you have a choice to change the day length from normal to long to longest. The game even gives you a warning saying the "NPC schedules were made with this in mind so changing it can affect a lot." It doesn't, cause the change between normal and longest is maybe a few extra seconds. It's so minuscule you'll be thinking you accidentally didn't change it, but you did and it just doesn't matter. Personally, I like a long day in games like this as it gets stressful having to run around for over half the day, every day, juggling your daily things (greeting villagers, maintaining the farm, etc). If you feel the same, then this game will stress you out. Also, the pastel/white UI can be grating on the eyes. No announcement has been made for adding a darker variant, so get ready for some retina burn.
- There are no permanent automation features in this game. If you've played Stardew Valley, Coral Island, etc you know one of the best parts of late game farming is setting your whole farm up and watching it run itself. While this game does give you the illusion of that, it's just an illusion. The automation features in this game require being powered by "essence" a currency you get by doing daily activities. While I assume later in the game once you've bought all the skill upgrades it isn't hard to create essence stones and power your automatons, it still sucks that you have to do it at ALL. Why do you need to craft a stone to power automation for a certain number of days? And how manageable is that when you have several automatons needed to run a massive farm? I'll be honest, I haven't really had the chance to use the features myself but knowing how it functions compared to other games in very disappointing.
I have more complaints, but those are my big ones. And of course I do have compliments too, but this is a negative review for a reason. You are looking at this review to see what issues I have with the game, so there they are. If you want someone buttering up the game to justify you buying it then I suggest reading a positive review. In my honest opinion, even in 1.0 the game isn't going to be worth the time. If any of the above change, I'll happily come back and edit my review. But in the meantime my advice is: Just go play another game in the genre.
