[h1]FoxMania: The Quest To Review All Fox Games On Steam![/h1]
[i]Conditions for inclusion:
[list]
[*] -The player character must be consistently a fox; the fox must not be merely a skin or a character option
[*] -Must have 100% working Steam achievements
[*] -Must not be a visual novel
[/list][/i]
[b]Game #35: Harmony in the Wild[/b]
You’re a young fox who gets washed up on the shore of an island with some kind of magical imbalance. The north half of the island is winter, the south half is summer, and there’s some kind of a spirit tree growing in the middle to maintain balance. As you explore the island and rescue the tree’s guardians, the tree will heal itself, or something. The game’s marketing advertises that you can switch between being a red fox and a snow fox, but it’s just an automatic animation that plays whenever you cross to the other side of the island, and has no impact on gameplay.
Unfortunately, I would call this a shovelware game.
This feels like a game that had a solid premise, and some good preliminary design and art put in, but it feels like they greatly underestimated the development effort, waited until the deadline was looming, and threw together a game engine in about three months. The experience felt consistently unpolished and amateur.
[b]Things I liked:[/b]
[list]
[*] -The music. Any charm or atmosphere this game has is absolutely tied together by the tranquil soundtrack.
[*] -There’s a nice day/night cycle, and the skybox was occasionally very pretty, showing auroras and meteor showers at night.
[*] -I liked the overall design of the landscape. Paths and routes convey passage between the different areas without feeling like unnatural land formations. There’s an art to designing overworld areas for game progression that still feel natural, and this game did very well.
[*] -The minimap was greatly appreciated.
[*] -The storybook art was cute.
[/list]
[b]Things I didn’t like:[/b]
[list]
[*] -Character animations are stiff and absolutely barebones, really giving it that unpolished shovelware feel. There’s hardly any character to the fox. You have to squint to see the differences in the walking, running, and swimming animations. The fox’s model doesn’t like to tilt on slopes, so you’ll get lots of hillside planking. Wild animal NPCs, the few that there are, usually look frozen in existential dread.
[*] -There are some really bad bugs that don’t update the player inventory/UI until the game is rebooted. For instance, you might go into the flying squirrel dungeon, where you are given the glide power to escape, and you can be stuck in there without the glide power until you reboot the game.
[*] -Controller functionality is half-baked and tagged as unsupported.
[*] -This game has some of the worst object pop-in problems I’ve ever seen in an open-world game. Trees and rocks were constantly popcorning into existence next to me. It was painfully immersion-breaking. Sometimes it felt like the game engine was loading objects in a random order and didn’t even bother trying to prioritize closer objects.
[*] -The powers are painfully underwhelming. The main game quest involves finding animal guardians in the wild, acquiring their power, and using it to help them escape the dungeon they’re trapped in. That sounds just fine on paper. In practice, half the powers are only used in their own dungeon and maybe one other place in the entire game. They’re so useless that I wouldn’t even bother to compare this to Zelda-like progression. The only useful powers are swimming and super-jumping. There’s also a glide power, but you can’t have both gliding and super-jumping selected at once, and none of the overworld is designed for gliding.
[*] -The collectibles are GLITCHY. Some of the collectibles were respawning and could be collected again, and counted. The in-game stats didn’t match with the Steam achievement counters. The in-game stats sometimes reset themselves when re-loading the save file. I broke the cap and collected 35/30 crystals, which reset to 25/30 when I reloaded. Maybe a bunch of the game’s collectibles are badly tagged. Maybe there’s an intended game mechanic that respawns collectibles sometimes. At this point, I actually don’t know. I just know that I was going for 100% completion, and I feel pretty confused and disappointed.
[*] -As I continued to play, I couldn’t ignore how sloppy they got with some of the asset placement. I began to notice a lot of broken trees leaning against nothing, rocks hovering above the ground, and so on. Also, some of the asset choices are baffling. Why are there snowmen, on an island inhabited by sentient animals? Forget that, why are there dozens of UNSUPERVISED LIVE CAMPFIRES scattered all over the island? What animals need campfires? What animals can even produce fire? Even suspending disbelief, that doesn’t even match with the vibe!
[/list]
I found the game to be about three hours long, and then I spent another four hours just hunting for collectibles, and quite enjoyed my time. So, perhaps I can say that the game did at least something right.
Even so, this game is undercooked and full of problems. I find it difficult to recommend unless you’re a hardcore fan of fox walking simulators and you can stomach a big lack of polish. It’s a finished game – I can appreciate that much, as some of the fox games I review here (Like Foxen Island and Brood) haven’t even made it that far – but it needed so, so much more polish.
3.5 / 10.
