Pickscover 2

good

Pickscover? I hardley knew her!

tree climing shoes are OP also poi

Charming but with some major issues to work out As someone with brief expirience with the developers other works it is seriously impressive the jump in scope, this is easily the most memorable project and, unlike the past endeavors there is an actual gameplay loop here. A levelling system, a skill tree, and items to create (lots of mining and crafting.... hm....) there is actual meat on the bones of this game. The limited art style, though scuffed is incredibly charming. Especially with the puppet rig enemies, lots of cute animals and cool looking monsters to fight. One enemy--I don't know if their name was specified, in the desert area with this large crustacean arm--it had me weary while first encountering it "how does this enemy behave? What type of attack will it do?" which is really fun for a game of its namesake, discovery. I have not played the very obvious inspiration for this game, Terraria. Although I would be suprised if certain aspects of Picksovers gameplay were in Terraria, like how slow and tedious it is to chop down blocks. You do a very slow animation to hit, or to mine--it drags the pace down significantly, and while I understand its function in combat, hell it adds a bit of fun timing with the slow swing of the sword, timing it with when you're close to an enemy, for destroying blocks it is extremely tedious. Which block, or space i have selected is also a bit confusing, the collision for the block seems to be to the right of where the block actually is? I actually wondered if you weren't able to place blocks at all because of the strange collision. The drafting table and torches have a 50% opacity version of the object to show you where it'll go where you place it, but not the blocks? As well, the game has some very strange optimization, now, my laptop isn't really any high performance gaming device, but it can run games. And considering Picksover 2 comprises of simple 2d textures with minimal animations--I don't know what caused it to average 7 fps (the fps count in the corner is actually really nice for this reason) and the games loading/saving goes without any specific screen or progress bar to a point where every time I save/load I'm wondering if the game crashed these issues, though, I should hope anyways--are products of a game in early access, I'm hoping these can be ironed out. Besides this, I think the graphics are a bit strange, we look at them from such a distance that I think it would be more logical to have more destinguished details on them, they all use minimal colour contrast for the most part which can make it difficult to tell certain assets apart (ex: wood/dirt) the background is also very high saturation which draws attention to the background rather than the foreground where all the action is happening? I do like the weather/biome system, though. Any game with rain in is always great, the actual gameplay expirience is very relaxing and ambiant, with a nice, though potentially repetitive soundtrack. My favourite theme is the underground one :) A fan of Terraria would probably be able to get more out of this game than I did, but from what I played, the game was very relaxing with a unique and imaginative set of enemies.

TLDR: The game is very intuitve and the dev updates it frequently. A quality of Pickscover 2 that I really like is that the game and its systems were pretty intuitive; I never thought that I would need to look something up or watch a Youtube video explaining a concept. Though its been a while since I've played it. With all the new stuff that the dev has added, I don't know how well this holds up. I felt bad writing this review at first since I haven't really kept up with the rapid development of this game, but I think my inexperience with these newer features goes to show how good the dev's work ethic for this game is. They post update notes on their Discord server, and after taking a look at the frequency of updates (Which was 2 per month at minimum), I changed my mind about writing this review. I know now that it will be imposible for me to write a review that will be 100% acurate by the time that you are reading it. (Which is a good thing)