Pros & Cons list incoming, but first a preamble.
So I just realized that there are like no reviews for this product, and that is a huge shame because it is extremely solid. No really, when I noticed there were no reviews of this I immediately started writing a long one. I have (very happily) spent thousands of hours in other games (not on steam tho), and never written a review, having played this game for about 2 hours, it already deserves one. Most games don’t need it, but these guys need the love and support a review would give them.
I will call it a game for now, but to be honest that is like calling Blender a game. It’s really not. Also, for this review I have to ignore the tabletop features as I haven’t had a chance to use them.
You can see I have only played for about 2 hours, but I genuinely do not need to play longer to understand how excellent this game is. I see effort in every pixel. The devs clearly work hard and they are really really trying to give you a bang for your buck. I will mention this more later but the only reason I don’t have the full dlc is just because I don’t need the tool enough to justify a full purchase rn (though I intend to buy later!). The free version *will* tell you if you will like this program or not, I promise. Devs are smart af for giving the demo for free and making the rest of the program paid via dlc. I love that way too much from a programming perspective. If a dev is reading this review have cookie for that idea alone.
Every aspect of the game bleeds care and affection, and though the devs are correct to keep it in early access at the moment, the attention it receives is staggering. It won’t stay in early access forever. I saw another review for this game that was sub-par to say the least, and the devs responded nice and concise, which to me displayed how much they cared about user feedback. This is a small project with big ideas, and the proof that it can become a big player. I will be keeping an eye on this one for a long long time.
I will list some pros and cons of this map editor now:
Pros
1: It doesn't burn much for computer resources. I cannot express how much this is true, and it is really really nice. It respects my OS (A highly customized Ubuntu linux install) very nicely, and operates very cleanly. I am super happy the devs allow it to run on linux and they can have a basket of gold stars for that alone. The fact that they do it well amazes me.
2: It has a *solid* asset list, which is sorted very nicely. I think the animals are a bit lacking, but I don’t have the DLC, so I *technically* don’t know this from experience. One thing to note though is that the assets are very high resolution and quality.
3: The effects, tinting, etc etc are very very very good, and impressed the frick out of me tbh, you can do basically anything to the environment, and I assure you it will go well and fit the aesthetic you are looking to make.
4: Dead-fricking-simple. There *is* a learning curve, but I had it figured out in an hour and a half. A program like this deserves your time, attention, and brainpower to figure out. That is the nature of this genre of program. What I will say is that the devs fight too hard for you to toss your hands in 5 minutes and say its unusable and not making sense. I gotta be honest, this is too simple for you to give up on and not understand. If you are struggling with something I would venture to say you are being plagued by a bug (which I have found only 1, maybe (can’t tell if it is a feature or not)). It is amazing how flexible and just insanely powerful this tool is given how simple it is to use. Not to be inflammatory, but if you think this is too complicated I have to say two things. First, clearly you have not used an alternative 3d modeling tool for this purpose (like blender). While those tools can get the job done, they are not designed to build a map, so doing so is not fast and easy like this. This game is *excellent* at its job. It will generally default to settings an environment details (like lighting) automatically (which are very very good, and I have not needed to change them), but will allow you full customization too! Second, if you think it’s too complicated, your kinda an idiot. I know the devs don’t want me to insult their playerbase, and so I’ll leave it at that… but man, the effort that has gone into simple UI, and ease of use is nothing short of breathtaking to me. Any other program would shove a million dialog boxes in your face, and paralyze you with choices you didn’t know you had to make. I love dialog boxes btw, but I came for simplicity and power, and I got that. No arbitrary box opens that you don’t ask for first. If you struggle to understand this program, you are just either not smart, missing something obvious (which happens to everyone, including myself. This is circumvented with effort, which the devs deserve as I stated above), or just trying not to like this.
5: Skyboxes are insanely good. Like *really really good*. (A skybox is a texture for the sky btw) I didn’t realize that I needed skyboxes in my life. They are so friggen pretty dude you don’t even know. I spend a good few minutes just flying around in the air because my favorite skybox just threw me into a trance. Looking at the skybox’s sun looked like actually staring into the sun! It was just shy of an irl sunrise I'm telling you. There are something like 90 or more skyboxes in the free demo. I can’t imagine how many are in the paid version.
6: Some non-obvious features exist that imo are not advertised well. Granted, these are such small details that for the devs to advertise them could easily end up disappointing people. Let me explain. In this game you can control the wind. Sounds cool right? It is! Imagine that its stormy and windy! To capture that requires wind! The thing is that if the devs were to advertise it, suddenly people would feel entitled to that being a big, excellent feature with a bunch of buttons (it does have a few already btw, enough to work simply and obviously with lots of customization, but not enough to paralyze) and have a big overall impact on the way you do things. I know because I am a dev who has to keep an eye on the same things. I have to be careful with what I advertise because I have limited time to deliver an elevator pitch, and I need to make sure that I don’t mention a small detail that my audience misunderstands to be something much bigger. I’ve been killed by that mistake before. So the following list of features are not ones worth advertising, but they do exist and add that spark to the game that I love. The excellence is in the details.
Wind, weather, rivers, time of day, that mexican/middle east/desert filter lighting thing that you see in AAA action movies (you know the ones. Pretty sure devs made this by accident but it was a neat discovery), sun glare, animated tokens, a animation creation tool, fricking inflight birds to give life to the map!? You can choose sparrows and ravens and a bunch of others how cool is that! Music playing, and of course, multiplayer tabletop features with physics dice you can throw on the board. Oh and one more cool thing they do advertise, but is cooler than they make it look, is the wall/floor making tool. With some tweaking it could be extremely powerful as a dungeon making tool. I’m sure that if you have read this much into my review, you have heard of dungeon alchemist. I was there for its kickstarter. This is straight better imo. It doesn't autofill rooms (so I guess dungeon alchemist wins there), but I’ll talk about this later.
See Cons in a comment below as somehow i hit the char limit.
