Havendock

I actually played ~5 more hours than listed here on Epic Games, so I got a really good sense of the game. This game could be awesome if it wasn't for how awful the UI is and how generally unintuitive the gameplay is. It could be this great cozy experience of gathering, building, and crafting. Instead, the experience is clunky and frustrating. Oh, you have castaways that can join your crew and do tasks? Great! Except that you can't assign them to the most basic tasks like farming or making coal or making simple food. And early in the game, about eight of my people got injured all at once but I had to research a bunch of things and wait to gather specific items before I could even craft what was needed to make them well (during which time, they just limped around and took up resources). Oh, and there are all these things I needed to get that I had to look up online (how to get a fish hook, white sand, recipe book, etc.). This feels like it was made with zero care for the player experience. Did humans actually test this??? I have played early access games way more polished than this mess. The most infuriating thing is that instead of actually addressing concerns and improving the game, the devs released DLC for it. Ugh. I refunded it the first time on Steam due to graphics issues, but even after playing it for free on Epic Games, I still wouldn't recommend this. It should be a fun and relaxing experience and instead I ended up deeply frustrated and annoyed.

Havendock is a sideways thumb kind of game. It does the colony sim thing decently well but doesn't really excel at anything and has a fair bit of jank. I'm leaning towards not recommend for a couple reasons. * The layout of where you can place docks is extremely arbitrary. I'm not sure if it's fixed or randomly generated, but there were several spots in my settlement where I could cut down on travel times substantially if I was just allowed to place a bridge somewhere other than where the game put it. Around half of my possible build area was on the other end of a circuitous winding path from the dock, which is a chokepoint that a lot of materials have to pass through. You do get flying transports but that leads into the next problem. * Transport workers just kind of do whatever they want and ignore things like movement efficiency versus other worker types, storage proximity, or sustaining production. You can't set resource priorities by recipe or building, only by the type of building. You can't reliably assign a building to be serviced or ignored by a specific worker type, the robot workers you have to build for progression can and will carry things across your entire base despite being slower than every other option. The most you can do is prioritize buildings by type, but even then you'll still end up in the situation where e.g. your coffee farms run out of seeds because the dumb workers took them all straight to your crafting area on a different island without replanting anything, even though you moved farms to the top of the input priority list. * Automation besides the transport workers also feels incomplete. The big one is pipes, a couple buildings let you build an upgrade to add a pipe but it only extends a single tile in a single direction. I can't help but feel there are better ways to handle this, especially for the underwater oil wells since each well produces enough crude for at least two refineries but you can only pipe to one. This isn't quite a problem, exactly, since you'll have an easy surplus of regional transport workers underwater, but because those workers are fish there's some major unintentional comedy going on. * Some resources can't be properly automated. Cotton is probably the worst offender - you can only get seeds by purchasing from a vendor, the plants don't regrow, and you can't buy enough to sustain a 3x3 farm, not that you could grow much more than that anyway given the space restrictions where it grows. The only alternative is expeditions, which require coffee, which has nearly the same problems with replanting and space restrictions. You can't get away from needing cotton, either, the fabric it's used to make is a crucial ingredient for a lot of mandatory crafting recipes. There's also slime, which you need to gather personally in an utterly perfunctory combat minigame, but you only really need it for a couple upgrades and the main recurring one (birdhouses) is easy enough to work around by just building more buildings instead. * Various things in the map are unnecessarily annoying or unfinished. The fishing village main building has an open fence in the back that's prone to getting you stuck when walking back to the dock. Underwater resource nodes once depleted hang around forever and can't be removed. You can't build land expansions on the coffee island despite how crucial it is to progression. There's an ice island accessible fairly early on that has uninteractable animals, an empty NPC house, and an empty build menu, I waited all game to see when this would be used but it never was. There's another island that's just a sandbar that you can sail your boat on (yes, on top of the sand) and see a couple sight gags but is otherwise unused. Music doesn't loop properly in most areas and doesn't change if you use any method of travel that doesn't involve a dock, which you will be doing constantly at endgame to save time. Also, and this is perhaps a bit petty of me, but I had the misfortune of playing the game at [i]exactly[/i] the right time to run afoul of a bug that put me in a glitched won-the-game state at around the halfway mark, which gave the achievement for winning but also prevented me from seeing any of the progression checkpoints past that point and resulted in zero use at all for some endgame materials (hydrogen, quarks). This bug was patched as I was wrapping up my last few achievements, so it shouldn't affect new players, but I'd be lying if I said it didn't hurt my experience or that the rest of the stuff I've mentioned wasn't enough for a sideways thumb on its own.

A year after the release and still looks like an unfinished game, but the game is still getting updates often so is possible that one day I'll change this review.

美术是ue商城免费素材大杂烩水平，流程和科技树是梦到那句写哪句，这品质凭啥特别好评啊？

This game is fairly easy to learn if you played other city builders and it's addicting to complete all the researches to unlock new things

A pretty fun and charming game with a unique style and a good amount of humor. There’s even a whip in the inventory that makes settlers work faster. The game rarely felt too repetitive, and some parts can actually be quite difficult, especially when trying to get certain resources and automate production efficiently. It was interesting discovering new islands. Still not sure if it’s actually possible to reach that huge distant island though. The progression feels steady because new mechanics and buildings keep unlocking over time.

It’s interesting and occupies you for a while but it then loses direction/ momentum. Unlocking each stage doesn’t feel progressive. I don’t feel a reason to return to play

Havendock was a cozy and enjoyable experience. You start on an island and have to gather resources floating by in the water to start your colony. Some of those resources are crates of items, and gathering them never fails to please my inner loot goblin. The colony slowly and steadily expands to contain a many settlers and other creatures performing various tasks. The settlers are one of the best parts of the game, in my opinion. The settlers have great variety in their cosmetic appearance. They also have a ton of different abilities. There are so many tasks for them to handle that you'll always be looking for that next settler to join the colony. Eventually you can customize and improve their abilities, too. Developing your settlers is satisfying from game start to game finish. One of the unique details about this game is the player's inventory. You can hold a seemingly unlimited number of items. At the end there were probably hundreds of different items, some stacking into the thousands. What's the last game you played that didn't have an inventory boss? Harvest everything! But that's not to say that storage buildings have no purpose here. Quite the opposite; Storage is crucial for automating the many, many tasks in the game. Your settlers can't directly access your character's inventory. Eventually you discover other locales, each with their own specific set of buildables. Automation you're used to using in one place may not be available in another, so you have to branch out and figure out new ways to grow and harvest those resources. Admittedly, it can make the game feel disjointed at times, and the selection of buildings you can or can't use in certain areas can feel arbitrary. But it's all good once things get up and running. As far as game performance goes, I have no complaints. Between all the settlers and birds and mice and other creatures, I must have had over 300 NPCs running around doing tasks. There was slowdown at times (which the game will automatically detect and offer to reduce your graphics), but it was never frequent or severe enough to truly be an issue. Similarly, the game does have its jank. It tends to be buggier the further in you get, but none of it was a significant issue for me. - You expand your colony by building flooring and bridges in predefined locations. There was one specific corner of a bridge tile that was problematic for me. When routing from one area to another, settlers would get stuck and pile up in that corner. To prevent the settlers from getting stuck, I had to build an obstacle that would force settlers to take a wider path around the corner. Since this was a bridge tile, I couldn't build directly on or in front of it. Eventually I simply removed the bridge tile, leaving a 1 tile wide bridge between areas. - There's a single-floor cave on one of the islands where you can engage in combat with three different types of enemies. The combat mechanic is so incredibly rudimentary and I'm surprised the mechanic was included in the game at all. You get literally one resource from fighting and you can't get that resource anywhere else or automate gathering it. - There's an island in the game that contains a dilapidated house and a non-interactable NPC. The island doesn't seem to serve a purpose in the game right now and has weird nautical combat-themed items and buildings, as if there was a mode where you would defend against pirates or raiders. It might be some leftover development artifact. The island is quite buggy: You can dismantle the house for resources, but the floor has a hole in it your character cannot escape if you fall into it, forcing you to use the debug menu to respawn. You can also literally drive your boat out of the water and up onto the island, something clearly unintentional. - On the final island, there's a bridge to a large, bare rock with a flat surface. When you enter the area, the menu for building your character's house appears, as if the area exists for you to be able to build character housing. However, the game doesn't seem to register the top of the rock as the buildable surface. Instead, things you build are built much lower, near the ocean, resulting in the objects being embedded/clipped inside the rock.

Bought it June 2023 on the fact it says it was going to have multiplayer, yet still no stable release of it with the multiplayer tag removed according to others.

wow I reaaaaaally appreciate this game! it's not another building game, its something really different. Oyu cannot just pause, you have to run this dock! There are several things to do, aaaall the time. Its not getting boring, even more complex when played for longer time. I really like the gameplay and the third-party-perspective. Thanks to the developers and looking forward to some good updates! :)