Alright guys, let’s go for a game on a platform I never expect to create reviews on. I wrote a review on this game before, but that was rather summing up the good and bad parts in a list. But I’m going to expand on my forum review of this game, and I’m going to give it a proper full review now that I played it even more. This game is free on the Android Market and the App Store and is made by the Japanese developer KarioSoft who is also known for great games like Game Dev Story. This game really took me many times back to my tablet. Is this game my guilty pleasure or is it actually good and fun to play? Let’s dive right into Beastie Bay.
What is this game?
Saying that this is an adventure game, I would tell you that you are correct. You would be right too if you said it’s a simulator. But I would also agree if you say it’s an RPG. This game covers multiple genres quite nicely.
The gameplay is extremely well and is actually pretty deep for a mobile game. At the start you get the basics explained and from there you can discover the game on your own. I love it how games do that, leave things up for the community or you to discover.
But one complaint I have is that the controls to place buildings are a bit uneasy. Even the cursor pad you get doesn’t help that much since it can get annoying to work with. You have to play the game to understand what I mean here, but the controls are the best they can get, but they don’t 100% work.
But for a mobile game it’s impressive how they get all these controls on a touchscreen without cluttering up the UI too much. I’m blown away that I feel like my complaint is such a nitpick that you actually can overlook it.
But back to the gameplay. You need to survive. It wasn’t too clear at the start to me that you needed to place your farms close to your allies and other villagers, or they don’t get harvested. Did I lose a lot of wood because of that? And here comes one major complaint with this game.
When your island grows, you can set shops for villagers of nearby islands to come and buy things. But if that villager finds wood, it doesn’t go to your resource pile. Nope, it goes to their shop. For that reason, I have to recruit a lot of new allies to just surround them with tree farms. This is something that the developers easily could improve on.
Explore the seven seas.
I like exploring as much as the next guy, but in this game, it’s extremely limited. You actually give orders to the AI to explore a certain area. And actually, it works. When you encounter an enemy you can start fighting the enemy in a sort of Final Fantasy-ish battle.
This is extremely fun and adds more depth to the game. But here we bump into the “not so free” part of this game. To remove level caps in the game, you’ll need a lot of golden coins. You barely ever get them in the game, sometimes by just playing, but you can get a lot by actually buying them with real hard cash.
But if you are in for some grinding, there is a way how you can get many coins easily, but that’ll take up sometime. And I’ll leave that up to you guys to figure out by yourself.
The story is actually not present in this game. You are stranded on an island together with your ally, and you go and explore and try to survive. And somehow, this game doesn’t need a story. This game is pretty fine how it is.
The gameplay might be simple, but it’s not easy. Some dungeons and area’s will get difficult really quick. Also, some parts of the game really made me scratch my head in confusion since I didn’t understand how the game wanted me to do.
How good is it really?
With KairoSoft, I notice a sort of tradition. The graphics are extremely well done. They are borrowed from their other titles, but it’s how you recognize them.
But then the music. I swear that there aren’t more than 5 to 6 tracks in the whole game, and you need to listen to one track over and over again. This gets old extremely fast. The sound effects are over the most line the same for many actions and something’s could have used some sound effects in my opinion.
Also, the shops are crazy expensive and the game has so many menus you easily get lost, and you might have to make a to-do list.
In addition to that, trying to capture creatures is a big guessing game which bait they might like. In addition to that, it’s so rare that they actually like that bait, you end up with almost never recruiting allies.
The day and night cycle is actually a pretty nice touch. It made me often rush to a dungeon since I wanted to try to catch a certain creature or defeat one since they gave a lot of XP.
The game is pretty lengthy too. You won’t finish this game in one sitting. I actually advise you to play this game in short bursts, like no longer than an hour or two. Since playing this game for long times can get you bored. This is a game meant to be played in short bursts.
So, I have been talking for quite a while about a mobile game, it’s time to wrap things up before I go running in circles.
Conclusion
The good:
+ Addictive gameplay.
+ Very varied.
+ Extremely well-made controls, with some slight flaws, but they work.
+ This game can be hard here and there but with dedication you will get there.
+ Amazing graphics.
The bad:
– Music and sounds.
– Grinding.
– The difficulty goes up way too fast.
– Sometimes the game is a bit overwhelming.
– Most upgrades and shop items are way too expensive.
Final thoughts:
This game isn’t for everybody. It’s a game with some flaws. Plus, you need to be able to look over ads. It’s a great game and surely worth a play in my eyes, but it isn’t a big game you would be putting your PS3 down for.
Yet, this game is excellent to play while on the road or waiting for the doctor. You easily see that the developers put their hearts and souls into this game, and they deserve your download.
And that’s everything I wanted to say about this game for now. I want to thank you so much for reading this article and I hope you enjoyed reading it as much as I enjoyed writing it. I hope to be able to welcome you in a future article but until then, have a great rest of your day and take care.
Score: 70/100
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