Sure, as some have said the up/down card sequence is repetitive but I don't think this is meant to be played in long stretches as it's a casual-style game. I play a few minutes here and there and very much enjoy the beautiful scenery. I doubt it's something I'll want to play again but it's well worth the sale price as I've so far played a little over an hour and have plenty of game left. BTW, I installed via Lutris using WINE on my Manjaro desktop. So far so good.
You start out with a couple of plants trying to figure out what will hybridize to make new plants. Okay, I'm good with that concept. Then you plant the seeds in a special pot, water, and wait for them to grow. I'm still good at this point. It doesn't take long for them to sprout but then the annoying part starts. The plants want petted? There are so many pests almost every single plant has to be sprayed within just a few minutes of game play. (Tip: I have real-life houseplants and not a one of them begs to be petted and rarely does any have any pests.) A lot of cute furniture for decorating is included but there's really no time for that when you constantly have to stop and pet the plants. So if you like petting plants and spraying bugs this is a great game. Otherwise I'd give it a pass.
My first reaction once I got into this game is how stinkin' cute it is. And from there you just kinda meander around fixing up the various camp spots on the mountain--everything goes at your own pace with no rush. I tend to get lost a lot in any game that requires navigation but here it doesn't matter. It's the type of game I can easily put twenty hours into just goofing off going to and fro, and that is actually something I enjoy very much.
(2 stars because it's pretty.) I was really hoping Cloud Gardens would scratch the same itch as another game I've played (Fresh Start Cleaning Simulator) but it just didn't. You're set with a scene just kinda floating around in nowhere and are supposed to create an overgrowth of flora. This is all fine and good but all you do is pick up junk and slap it onto the frame/car/whatever until a seed is created then pick off the seed and repeat until you have another seed ball to place, then repeat the process until you hit the score to move on to the next stage. I did not find it at all engaging.
For a little perspective, I've been playing video games for fifty years on various consoles but the last twenty-five years mainly on my PC. Mostly I play with keyboard/mouse rather than a controller. I see a lot of reviews loving the graphics for "A Short Hike" and I thought for sure once I got into it I'd like them too but I truly am not digging the "art style" at all. On top of that I find the keyboard control to be clunky at best. On the up-side it did install and run perfectly on Manjaro so I give the devs props for that.
Summer in Mara has a lot of potential but it didn't take long for me to lose interest. I could accept the NPCs were all cardboard cut-outs. I also didn't mind the buildings that could not be entered but were simply UIs to conduct dialogue and fulfill quests. I'll list the rest as follows: Pros: Discovering new islands and collecting crated animals from the ocean. Fairly simple interface for crafting and cooking. Tools auto-select when you need it. Crops do not NEED watered, it just speeds up their growth. Cons: UI is clunky and too deep. Trying to quickly find quests you're doing takes too long. Planting crops requires a deep dive into the inventory panel just to select the seeds. Watering is a pain in the rear as the bucket starts emptying as soon as you fill it. Fishing mini-game is limited to three tries which makes it more frustration than it's worth. Even after all that I was willing to play along--that is until the offerings to the so-called gods kept happening. This game has a level of spiritualism that I am not okay with, and it's not optional.
Like some said it IS a touching story but for me that was almost an aside as I got pulled into the adventure of solving each chapter. I'm not the sharpest knife in the drawer so sometimes elements of these games go whirring by my head at light speed. This one didn't so much. Yes, there was this one puzzle I found to be a pain in the backside but overall I enjoyed all the collecting, most of the puzzles, and the putting together of a special puzzle at the end of a chapter was especially fun. I recommend this to anyone who enjoys this kind of thing.
What you get in Tinytopia isn't a serious city builder but a whimsical toy, a little bit limited in its scope. I give it an extra star for the wind-up dinosaur. Pros: Levels are fun and sometimes a little challenging. - Graphics are adorable and fit very well with the toy concept. - There are humorous bits built in that will be mostly noticeable when making mistakes. +/- Being able to have buildings combine for better specs is a fun aspect (although it can start feeling like a chore when you're combining numerous housing units to meet population requirements. Cons: The economy is terribly imbalanced. Suffice it to say by placing a few buildings the player goes from running into the red financially to making thousands every cycle. - The over-powered economy made some of the levels feel more like a grind to meet certain goals. - Several of the buildings do not want to properly combine. - Sandbox map is extremely limited. There is only the one and I had the idea of using it for experimentation of combining buildings only to discover being able to access said buildings was dependent on completing a scenario. Overall I'd say play it if you enjoy fairly simple city building puzzles but in the end it left me itching to go back to a serious city builder.
I went by reviews saying this was so SimCity 2000-ish. In my opinion the only thing smart about it is whoever designed it convinced people to buy it under that guise. Firstly, the "graphics style". It really looks like a whole lot of untextured meshes. It's just ugly and flat. Next, the game play is so simplistic it isn't even interesting, not even watching the buildings go up is interesting, probably because they just look ugly and flat. This perhaps I missed, I don't know, but I looked and looked and tried every visible button but I never did find a way to rotate the screen. Is that really just not there? I'd recommend to anyone considering buying this to either return or venture into the realm the old SimCity games because most likely you'll lose yourself in building those for hours on end. Seriously, all the time I was trying this I was thinking I could have been playing one of those instead and actually enjoying it.
