Coral Island
Coral Island is an isometric 3D Stardew clone. It starts out as a complete clone, and gradually introduces it's own identity as time goes on. It has identical mechanics for mining, farming, selling crops, a monster guild, mine elevator shafts, skill levels, asteroids landing on the farm overnight, festivals, a community centre - even the seed shop is CLOSED ON WEDNESDAYS. It does do a few things on it's own though, and those are all pretty nice. The cooking and bug catching are fun, and the world is quite large. I've enjoyed quite a few hours with it, but after giving it a break for a month or so I found it difficult to get back into it. Maybe once they've finished their roadmap.
Pros
- I really like the bug catching
- Fossils can be found which give you bones for specific dinosaur statues
- Can craft from chests globally
- Scarecrows show their radius without mods
- Diving
- Friendship does not decay over time if you don't speak to or gift people
- Free fast travel
- Cooking requires different utensils for each recipe, which all need to be bought separately
Cons
- Ugly character creator
- There's an annoying delay before you can move, every time you enter/exit a building/area
- Can't drop items
- Every time you swing your sword it propels you miles forwards, so you get one swing, and then you're behind your target facing the wrong way. And as the character doesn't attack towards the mouse, this means you have to fix your direction with the keyboard before you can attack again
- For many actions that you should be able to hold down the mouse button (sowing seeds, harvesting crops), you have to click on every plot individually
- Rolled my eyes hard at all the fanfare they put into the founders hall. I didn't back this, I don't care that there are several hundred statues of backers in the museum
- Combat is really bad. There's no feedback when you hit an enemy, sometimes enemies are unhittable, there are very few sound effects, enemies keep moving a bit after they're dead, and they can damage you after you kill them. It's so bad.
- Runs like ass on Steam Deck, even on lowest settings
- Patches marked as "hotfixes" are usually 8gb
- I found the townspeople and their names entirely forgettable
Bugs
- Ran into a bug on the very first day, where I tried to go to bed, declined, then couldn't move and had to redo it all again
- Cockles and Clam Shells are marked as food with energy and health values, but you can't eat them
- Spelling mistakes
- In the mines, sometimes the game just randomly stops showing the tile highlight
- Second time I booted up the game, I couldn't do anything because it thought I had a controller plugged in when I didn't. Had to restart the game twice and plug a controller back in for it to recognise the mouse
- One of my signposts lost it's icon when I transitioned from Spring to Summer
- A beetle in town disappeared before I got to it
- The dehydrator (and other machines) regularly just stop working until you restart the game