Now Playing: Coral Island

After clocking just over 100 hours in Coral Island I think I’m pretty much done with it. I feel like I could (and perhaps should) have stopped far sooner but . . . I just can’t help myself, can I? But let’s not get ahead of ourselves, eh? As I said in my First Impressions post, Coral Island is like playing a more thirsty version of Stardew Valley. There’s a lot more emphasis here on the ‘social’ aspects – building friendships and finding romance with the local residents of Starlet Town.

In fact, it feels like there’s a lot more emphasis on everything besides managing your farm. And for me, at least, that’s not really a positive because like Stardew Valley, I was always more interested in the business side of the experience. I can’t say I didn’t enjoy working on my little farm but, by the end of my first year, I was already producing maximum quality crops and goods. And by the end of my second year, I was so wealthy and my farm (and house) were upgraded to such a degree that I no longer needed to keep farming at all.

I did keep at it – for a bit – because it was fun seeing if I could improve upon my maximum daily profit but I was also a little surprised and disappointed by how easily and quickly the actual farming aspect of game became completely irrelevant to the experience. At one point I just stopped planting seeds because I no longer needed to. I stopped harvesting from my greenhouse. I did let my animals out of the barn every morning though – I’m not a monster!

Coral Island puts a lot more emphasis on all the aspects surrounding the farming – and, to be fair, there’s a hell of a lot to see and do. You have a Temple to restore requiring various ‘offerings’ some of which you’ll acquire from your farm but others from out in the wild. You have a museum with collections to complete of artefacts, insects, fish, underwater critters, precious stones and fossils.

You have a cavern (dungeon) to progress through which later leads you onto yet another deep cavern to explore in one of several new map areas you can unlock as you improve the town ‘ranking’ and slowly restore the Temple. As the town ranks up you’ll also unlock more cosmetic items (clothing & furniture) and be able to invest in and build town ‘attractions’.

The town is full of people to befriend, hang out with and potentially romance and marry and pop out a few kids with. They all have their own stories to explore and I had some fun doing so. This ‘social’ side of the game is clearly a key selling point and it can make Coral Island feel more like a dating sim at times than a farming one.

You have an entire underwater map of trash to clear in order to clean up an oil spill which in turn leads you to meet the local mer-folk and even get access to an underwater farm. I didn’t bother with the underwater farm at all though because . . . at that point, I didn’t even really need my farm on the island above.

I feel like I reached a point so quickly where my farm became more or less ‘finished’ – and yes, I know I could have kept tweaking it, making it even more profitable and automated – but for me, my work was done. I had everything I needed. More money than I knew what to do with and so I just focused on everything else to do and that’s where most of my time ended up getting sunk.

Coral Island became a bit of a grind at that point to say the least. Clearing the trash from the ocean was bad enough, but completing the museum? Insects, critters and fish appear during certain seasons, at certain times and during certain weather. If you miss one or two, you might have to wait an entire year for a chance to catch them again. And that’s exactly what happened to me and I ended up skipping through days as fast as possible to grab the last couple of fish and insects I needed.

But what was far worse were the artefacts, precious stones and fossils. The artefacts come in different chest types, the stones in different geodes and the fossils in different fossil nodes. You have to crack each open to see what you’ve found and every item has a different rarity and percentage rate to drop.

In other words – they’re loot boxes. You can open – and I sure as shit did – hundreds of them and just keep finding repeat items. The bulk of my playtime in Coral Island was probably spent farming these various loot boxes so I could complete the museum collections. I eventually started just cracking them open in the morning and – if I didn’t get a least one new item – reloading the day until I did. Eventually, I was able to complete all the collections and get my achievement and that was when I decided to call it a day.

Now, I can’t say I don’t have myself to blame for so obsessively trying to complete the collections but it’s kind of a key part of the game seeing as it’s tied to your overall town rank and I can’t believe they made it this tedious (and randomised) to do. At least with the insects, fish and critters you can know roughly when and where they’ll appear but for everything else, you’re reliant upon what might be a very frustrating RNG.

All that complaining aside – I still enjoyed my time with Coral Island quite a bit. There’s a relaxing aspect to it – even all the repetitive clearing of ocean trash is a nice way to zone out and not worry about anything else for a while. The game looks and sounds nice and there’s a ton of stuff to keep you occupied. And the farming aspect – whilst it lasts – was certainly fun!

And the game is still receiving updates with a new one currently in beta at the time of writing that adds a ‘save anywhere’ option – very welcome for those of you trying to game the RNG system. I think the problem is, they’ve added so much already and there’s so much other stuff to get stuck into that it doesn’t even really feel like a ‘farming’ game any more. At least not to me. Overall – I liked it. I didn’t love it. If you liked Stardew Valley, it might be worth checking out.

7/10

Forza Horizon 6: First Impressions

I don’t buy many games at release these days and of those I do, very few am I willing to pay for ‘premium’ editions. But, in the case of Forza Horizon 6, after absolutely loving the previous Forza Horizon 5 and its post release content with nearly 200 hours clocked on Steam, I figured – why the hell not?

Forza Horizon 6 is bigger, better looking, better feeling to play and features an absolutely fantastic map of Japan to explore. In fact, a significant chunk of my current 20 or so hours with the game has just been spent driving around and seeing all there is to see in each region of the map. The map is large, yet feels densely packed with a variety of terrain and features.

You might think each region is its own ‘island’ as far as terrain goes, but you’d be wrong. Every single region is like a varied, densely packed little map in its own right. It’s one of several aspects of Forza Horizon 6 that just feels so effortlessly perfect. But it likely wasn’t effortless at all – clearly a hell of a lot of design work went into this map to make sure that no matter where you are or what you’re doing, you’re going to love every second of it.

Because it’s not just an open world map – it’s race tracks. Road racing, street racing, dirt racing, cross country – the map had to facilitate not only a fantastic open world environment to explore, but also accommodate dozens of varied and engaging race tracks. The fact it does this and does it so well is pretty damn impressive, and probably not as appreciated as it should be because – as I said – it just all feels so effortless.

Forza Horizon 6 just oozes quality. It’s so polished and smooth and so packed with content that you might not know where to even start. But that’s what I like about this new (or old, I suppose if you’ve played some of the previous Forza games before 5 – I haven’t) wristband system that slowly unlocks new events as you progress. It also restricts many early races to specific car grades or classes.

Some might find this too restrictive, but it serves the purpose of preparing you to build up a varied garage of vehicles that are each tuned at different levels and serve different needs. And I feel like that’s even more important in Forza Horizon 6 than I did in 5 because compared to Forza 5, Forza Horizon 6 feels like it leans more heavily into the ‘sim’ part of ‘simcade’.

You really feel the difference in terrain and road surfaces. You really notice the difference in grip and tyre type. You come to see how some races favour cars tuned for handling and acceleration and others for speed. There have been races where I struggled to finish within the top 6, only to make a few key adjustments to my car set up and then immediately breeze through the race on my second try.

Proper tuning and car parts for the tracks never quite felt as important in Forza Horizon 5 as it does so here, particularly once you start bumping up the difficulty. I started on Average but have since progressed to Expert where, provided my car is properly tuned I can still win fairly comfortably. That said, there are still odd tracks where the difficulty spikes wildly at times which was also a problem in Forza 5, although I’m sure they’ll all be balanced more over time.

Now, this is only a first impressions post, so I don’t want to get carried away, as tempting as it might be. But as you can probably tell, I’m already loving what I’ve played so far. The game runs absolutely beautifully. I was actually shocked at not only how good it looks but how smoothly it runs. I haven’t dared touch the new customisable ‘Estate’ feature yet – I fear I may end up spending all my time building stunt tracks rather than racing so I’m saving that for later. There’s plenty more for me to see and do. I love the little ‘Explore Japan’ tours that you can go on in particular. I should have a full review up next month – if I can drag myself away long enough to write it, of course.