v0.2.0 prototype
Pros
+ Controls for moving across flat ground feels good because you can move camera and direction your character is facing using the mouse. However, jumping feels really bad because you only do baby jumps. You can't even get over short rocks. There's also no animation where the character interacts with a ledge to pull themselves up and over it.
Cons
- No Gallery
- Game doesn't tell you what the controls are. You can't check it in the settings menu. I have no idea what the interact button is. So it's unintuitive how you're supposed to chop down bamboo, grab materials like stone or drink water
- Can't save manually. No checkpoints. So if you die you respawn back at the raft. Edit: apparently the only way to save the game is to exit
- Can't open up the quest log to look up your quests
- The collision on bamboo is really bad, because the leaves have collision, making them much wider than they appear. Navigating bamboo forests can cause weird camera behaviour
- No sprint
- Can't cross very shallow (knee deep) river areas
- No inventory
- No map. I understand that we're on a new island, but from a gameplay point of view, it would be nice to get a map that gradually gets revealed as you explore
- You can randomly die from walking near a river? I died while trying to reach a stone temple, but was walking along the shallow river, which you can't cross. My character was in collision with some plants along the river and just died
Conclusion
Saying the game sucks because it's using Unreal engine is as stupid as saying a game sucks because it's 3D instead of 2D. There's a lot of great 3D games using Unreal engine and there's a lot of bad games that use Ren'Py or RPGM. The game sucks not because of the engine. It sucks because it's missing a lot of the basic functions you'd expect from a game. No inventory menu, no saves, no gallery, no buttons to interact with the world, no crafting, no resource gathering, and no base building. Currently it's just a walking simulator with a really big map and no means of interacting with 99% of it.