Game Review - Pine

Game Review: Pine by Twirlbound
Score: +2/-7 and FAIL

I got Pine free from the Epic Games Store quite a while ago. If you don't already know, the Epic Games Store gives away full titles every week, and not cheesy indie titles either.

Pine is an open world action adventure simulation game. Set in the beautiful world of Albamare, you take on the role of Hue, a smart young adult who will have to explore, trade and fight his way through a stirring ecology filled with creatures much smarter than humans.

• +1 Nice world for the art style. Good density of enemies and critters for a survival game so you're not basically fighting every step of the way and there's time to just forage around for stuff.
• +1 Interesting system for factions and an ecology where tribes can run into each other and interact according to their current relationship status.
• FAIL Really stupidly clunky combat. And honestly there's no excuse these days when there are so many even basic combat models they could have copied. Outright fail here no matter what positives this game has.
• -1 The button for dodge is rarely responsive so you can't reliably dodge or execute a lunge move, which they try to teach you in the tutorial.
• -1 They recommend you focus a target, which means you always keep it in front of you and basically you circle around it. A common feature of many games. Except here, your character is offset to the left; and you literally cannot walk forward straight, but always toward the side of your target. This makes targeting really awkward.
• -1 Even if you don't use focus target, the flow and pacing of combat feels really clumsy.
• -1 Enemies can also eat food mid-combat, drawing out fights tediously. It's not clear how much food they have so you are forced to focus down one at a time as well as burn them quickly before they run away and eat more food to heal. There's a reason most games don't have common encounters doing this, and Pine shows us just why it's a terrible feature.
• -1 They want you to play a survival game of gathering stuff and crafting, but your inventory is so tiny, limited by a count of the types of things you picked up.
• -1 No straightforward way to craft more carry ability or home base to put your stuff. Just being able to do this early on would have made this game more playable and not so irritatingly tedious where you have to manage your inventory and run around the map looking for what sounds like common items but are surprisingly rare, just to make common materials for crafting.
• -1 You can donate it to a tribe for more positive influence with them but you don't want to do that or simply drop rare / hard to get items.

Whatever potential payoff there is to playing this game is basically lost because of the sheer irritating gameplay blocking any sense of progress or momentum in following the story.