TerraCards Review
I think it's a cute game, great concept, lots of potential, but it does not scratch the itch for me. I noticed several thumbs-up reviewers had about 15-20 hours in-game. I requested a refund and left the following remarks:
I hope my notes go to the dev! It was kinda fun for 40 minutes or so. It's a cute game and a good concept, but it just didn't scratch the itch for me. My biggest problem is that I don't feel like there's a "point" to the game. There's not much in the way of meta-progression, so it doesn't feel like I'm working toward anything. It's also pretty overwhelming - there's a lot of crops and information thrown at you all at once. And then once crops and structures are placed and the island starts to grow, there's just so much going on and I couldn't keep track of it. After my initial success on my farm, I basically lost interest and was just clicking around without much thought - kinda felt like an idle game at that point moreso than a roguelike. I'm not sure how, but I think the systems in the game could be improved to help you keep track of what's all going on. Good luck with the game! I see a lot of people liking it, so it may just be a not-my-style kinda issue. i'm sure some of the overwhelm would get better with more playtime, but without a sense of progression I'm personally not motivated to play it more. I know its in early access, but I'm also quite poor and can hardly afford one game a month, so I don't want to hold onto a game in hopes of it going in the direction I'd like.
Some specific suggestions:
- When you're deciding on your next set of cards & you click the eye to look at the board, tooltips should still work
- right-click on a structure currently lets you choose which things to produce. It would be nice if this would also highlight specific crops in play that are feeding into it. It would be nice if this also provided an information icon to click on and view more info about the structure (like in the built-in knowledgebase)
- When clicking around in the knowledgebase, there doesn't seem to be any "back" functionality so I found myself searching again and again
- The tutorial got the job done, but it might be better to space it out more rather than provide all the information at once.
- A condensed knowledgebase of just things I have in play would be nice, or maybe right-click on an island to open the knowledgebase for things that are on just that island.
- Show a visual indicator of a structure's range when you right click or hover for tooltip
- When placing a structure, highlight crops, animals, and other structures that can be inputs for the structure you're placing. Similarly give an indicator to show when the structure you're placing has no inputs in its range. A similar feature for output-targets would be nice.
- The default cursor didn't click in the right spot. This was okay because there was a setting to change the cursor, but not ideal.
- Start players with a limited set of crops, animals, and structures available, and require them to unlock through multiple playthroughs. This would provide meta-progression AND it would significantly reduce overwhelm.
- Create some kind of questing system - like you start a run and the goal is to build a country. Your first farm to build would have a relatively low goal and no modifiers. Then as you progress, and you start building your second farm, some modifiers might apply, and maybe you have to hit different gold or energy or fuel targets.
- Add adversaries - you can buy crows to kill your crops, but these could be added by the game as an opponent to contend with, at least if certain modifiers are active.
- Let me buy more cards if I have extra gold. I had so much gold and nothing to do with it.
But also don't let me sway you from your vision for the game! Some folks may not want questing or too much meta-progression. Some people really like idle games. Some people might prefer to be overwhelmed and get less-overwhelmed as they learn. Idk. It's your game, follow your vision!
As far as things I like - its hecka cute, there's a lot of opportunity to do a run with different playstyles, the complexity provides a really high skill ceiling and opportunity to grow as a player, there are 3 unlockable characters which provides some meta-progression, the passive upgrades (relics?) are a good touch, there are tooltips on hover, there is a knowledgebase to reference, peanut cows lol peanut cows are so silly and i love it.
Regards, Reed