I've been playing "Pine" for a while, as i had read some interesting concepts about it i grabbed the free offer on Epic.
Pine has some (very simple) survival elements with stamina and hunger, but there's some interesting features that are supposed to make the open world "alive" : there are several tribes in the world that have changing relations and send workers/fighters do their work in order to feed their tribes, increasing their numbers or failing and going to ruin, with you in the middle while exploring said open world and getting involved.
The cartoony look wasn't really up to my taste to be honest (it's noticably inspired by the Zelda games, those tribes are made of a lot of cartoony animal people tribes, and you're a cartoony human) so i hoped the gameplay would make up for it.
My first experience was rather an annoyance , from the main menu starting a new game will have you waiting for nearly 2 long minutes (on the paper it does not seems that long, but looking at a screen and doing nothing waiting for 2 minutes is feeling really long) before finally getting to play (some people even reported it takes much longer than that for them).
Once ingame there was also a big performance problem for me, the game was running simply like crap, for reason i didn't understood considering the game does not really look half as good as some other games on my system that were running incredibly smoothly on my system.
Was it another case of "Unity is really not an efficient and performing engine" ? Looked like it unfortunately, unless the game is just not optimised.
After lowering settings/resolution a lot (there's not much visual settings, so you can't really pinpoint what's the lag real source) and very importantly as i found out disabled the game own V-Sync settings (that was easily cutting framerate by half, making it really choppy) , i could finally play relatively smoothly (even it then looked rather average mediocre as least the environment was still visually good enough) .
I got used to those cartoony look and characters after a while and saw that Pine had indeed some potential as after finding a tribe of bizarro lizards people and bribing them into getting neutral (oh yes, every animal people tribes hate you for some reason, maybe explained in the game later, you will need to find a donation shrine and donate their prefered items you gather in order to get them to become neutral and at most even friendly), i could explore their village and observe after some talk to their leader and merchant that their fellow tribe members were busy walking around, getting out of their village and going to gather their town required material and foods then coming back for the delivery.
Interesting for now. After trying to follow some quest chain, i ran into some giant mammoth man (i thought about DF when i saw that guy
) that allowed me to increase my inventory size so i could gather more stuff , then went back into the world.
Some combat were going on in the regions i travelled, i noticed that even after finding some more protections that my character can die really fast while every enemies are able to take a lot of punishment, wouldn't be a problem if the combat system wasn't that clunky, maybe i'm not used to it enough but there's a cluncky feel to the controls when fighting (at least you can camera lock the nearest opponent , it helps with the controls) .
The interesting stuff is that due to the tribes relations, you can easily run into a fight that devolve into some free for all melee as there are patrols and gatherers working around their territory borders.
At some point in the desert i was fighting some kind of electrical gecko (a monster, not an animal people) when some kind of cat guy or gal (i'm not sure to be honest) that ran to location and started to throw bombs making things a bit hilarious
Then some kind of funny looking turkey guy or gal rushed in and attacked everyone.
Managed to run away while everyone else was duking it out.
Oh and a word about dying : really try your best to avoid dying, not because the consequence (in Pine it does not matter as you lose nothing of your progress).
But because dying does lead you into a long full minute long of loading time again for whatever reason, running away is a much better outcome
So as a conclusion for what i played there's potential, but there is really a need for optimisation (i haven't run yet into all those other bugs i saw reported) , i wish the game was less cartoony.
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Topic: Blurb on Games that probably don't deserve their own threads. (Read 320168 times)