Coral Island

The game is just too big. It feels more like they spent all their time trying to one up every other farming sim out there and less time actually trying to make a quality product. Every time I clear 1 task 2 more pop up to take its place. Like the never ending farming sim hydra. Meanwhile there are still many bugs riddled throughout that have been known about for years in the forums that have still not been fixed. They’re little things but they should have been patched out by now. It’s clear the devs don’t care; they just wanted more content and went for quantity over quality. Everything is just too extra, goddess donations, then mermaid donations, then town improvements, then guardians. And the rewards become less and less fulfilling with each new task set in front of you. Add to that the next draw the dating element and again every 3 seconds you’re trying to do something and there’s another cutscene there’s so many cutscenes you will get annoyed if you’re trying to get anything done and have more than 4 hearts with more than 1 person. But the 1 time you need an event to play out to get married the game won’t even tell you where this event is and you’ll have to google it and see where other players found it. At least that’s what I had to do for Yuri or run all over on every day of the week on every weather type until i finally got an event to trigger because it’s that convoluted that any one of those things could change whether the event triggers or not and without the event you can’t get married. If you were looking forward to dating any of the merfolk, have fun waiting til year 2 or 3 to even start this because you have to clear the entire ocean and then complete their missions to walk on land before you can fulfill all their requirements as well. It started out so good too it had some really good bones. And I loved how it made the genre its own with the addition of the ocean elements but they went for quantity over quality and it’s just too much. A game needs an ending. Not some endless daunting task. I get enough of that at work.

This game is not accessible or even finished. The "inclusiveness" and "diversity" in the game should've extended past the art. The characters are brown. One is nonbinary. The mom you can date has stretch marks. Diversity! Is anyone on the dev team over thirty and have any of them left their parent's house yet? The game crashed several times during normal play. My character would get locked into a dash animation if I got off the horse the wrong way. Events didn't seem to trigger in the correct order. I got caught on tons of geometry. The animations are so slow and if you interrupt them you will be punished. The gameplay is not "inclusive". I have severe executive dysfunction. So much of the game was nearly unplayable when it didn't need to be. I spent most of my time in my inventory trying to sort it out, running between chests, and babysitting artisan equipment. There's a huge variety of items. There's five different qualities of items. Inventory space is extremely limited. I can't look at a screen of equally-sized squares with similar-looking icons differentiated by small, differently colored stars with small numbers to tell me the quantity and figure out what to keep and what to sell and what to throw away and it doesn't help that I am running between chests and constantly switching through menus, unable to remember the information because I'm having difficulty understanding it. Processing artisan goods is it's own annoyance since some items can be preserved, some can be made into juice, and some of that juice and be made into wine! The game does not tell you what can do what, you will have to just run up to the machine and try to remember what can be processed into what. I have trouble remembering my cat's name and love error messages, so it's fun. The horse is just an unpleasant running speed boost that you have to watch a long unmounting and mounting animation that's prone to bugging out if you interrupt it. Which you will because you can't forage or gather while on your horse. Which leaves me the waypoint travel system. I initially liked it, but it makes the island feel small and using it wipes my short-term memory on screen shift. I understand I can't play every game, but these aren't design decisions that aid the game. The game doesn't need five qualities of items, it doesn't need such small inventory, it doesn't need to rely so much on menus and teleporting that are accompanied by disjointed transitions. These are all bad designs baked into the game that only serve to aggravate the player. The writing isn't anything. It's not snappy, it's not cozy, it's not thoughtful. It's filler. It fills the text box so the writer can hit next and move on with their lives. If you didn't have fun writing it, what makes you think I'm going to have fun reading it? The npcs in Animal Crossing live deeper lives than the ones on Coral Island do. Diversity and inclusiveness should be in the writing and the gameplay, not the art. Your character isn't diverse because they're brown or they're a little shy. Giving a character different pronouns than everyone else doesn't cut it. Putting up your little rainbow flag doesn't welcome anyone who wasn't already welcome. The intended "diversity" and "inclusiveness" of the game does more harm than good. The characters aren't people they're just boxes to check off. Uh, we need a gender-neutral. Uh, we need a Mexican. Uh, she's a mom, give her stretch marks so the player feels virtuous for not minding them. The only identity these characters have is the one the artist gave them. Everyone is more-or-less happy. There's no darkness in anyone or anything. The characters generally get along, and if they don't, it's only in that one cutscene. It's not going to carry over to anything else. There's no economic difficulties. There's no mental illness. I don't really even think there's any physical illness. Which could make it cozy if the characters had depth. Sadly, they do not. I'd say they're exactly what they look like, but I don't want to give the writing credit for what the artist did. Seriously, guys, I could've farmed this writing out to ChatGPT and it would've done a better job even with the hallucinations. So it's inclusive and diverse if you're already included. Best kind of inclusiveness if you ask me.

I love Coral Island. It's charming, relaxing, and genuinely fun to play. The farming, town restoration, characters, and overall atmosphere are great. If all I had to judge was the gameplay itself, I'd recommend it without hesitation. Unfortunately, I can't recommend it because of the technical state of the game. My negative review isn't just about crashes. It's about crashes combined with poor optimization and game-breaking bugs that can permanently damage a save file. I've owned the game since before 1.0. I've watched content updates, new systems, multiplayer, romances, and various features get added over the years. Yet crashes remain one of the biggest issues I've experienced. The latest patch introduced manual saves and autosaves, which ended up being the most valuable feature in the update. That alone says a lot. I haven't relied on manual saving this much since games from over a decade ago. I kept playing despite the crashes until one finally caused irreversible damage to my save. During a late-game Giants quest, the game crashed immediately after a cutscene. When I reloaded using the autosave, the required totem could no longer be interacted with, preventing me from continuing the main quest. At that point, the issue stopped being "I lost 30 minutes of progress." It became "I lost hundreds of hours because a crash permanently broke my save." That's what ultimately killed the game for me. Coral Island is a good game buried under technical problems. The content is there. The charm is there. But none of that matters if players risk losing progress or breaking their saves after investing dozens or even hundreds of hours. If you're lucky, you'll only lose 30 minutes to a crash. If you're not, you may lose an entire playthrough. So buy it if you can tolerate constantly losing daily progress because I did too. Till it's no longer daily but the whole save that got lost. Update (July 2): The developers responded to my review and Hotfix 1.3-1248 specifically mentions fixing the autosave progression issue that appears to match the bug I encountered. I appreciate that they acknowledged the reports and released a fix. It doesn't change my own experience, as I had already recovered using an earlier manual save and moved on to other games, but I'm glad to see the game is still actively being maintained. If I return in the future and the game proves to be stable over a longer period of play, I may update this review.

I bought Coral Island back when it had initially "released" out of Early Access. It was pretty rough. There were rewards for finishing bundles that didn't even exist in the game yet. Now, something like two years later, I can honestly say: this is a great game! The devs are attentive and work really hard to continually bring free updates that greatly improve the feel of the game. The mechanics are fun, and yes, it was inspired by Stardew in a lot of areas. There are even similar quests and festivals. BUT the game itself feels completely different. I think they did a wonderful job with the character development - the various romantic options are all excellent! - and the 3D visuals are really well done. The town feels super alive and lived-in. Honestly, I really love this game. I wish they hadn't released 1.0 as early as they did, because the game wasn't ready, but they've now more than made up for it. I strongly recommend this if you're itching for another farming sim with a lot of life and love!

11 hours into my first playthrough, and while I have mostly enjoyed the game, I have just hit a major bug- a recipe needed to progress the story was not received after the cutscene that is supposed to provide it, and as far as I can tell there is NO other way to obtain this recipe. After reading some posts on the forum, this apparently can happen to any of the game critical recipes (i.e. smelter, extractor) that you get from quests/cutscenes, and there is no know fix or alternate way to obtain them. This is my first playthrough and I've already hit an issue where my only choice is to completely start over and HOPE it doesn't happen again? I cannot currently recommend this game, which is sad, because I had really liked the game up until this point. :(

Before you buy: search up "coral island no music" This is a persistent issue for over a year and still not fixed. You're paying for a game that "left early access" that devs are unable to loop the background music so it just stops and randomly starts again. My theory is that they most likely assigned a game object underground that plays music, and that game object deloads just like other offscreen objects to prevent lag, breaking the music tied to that object. And people have complained to the devs already, so it shouldve been fixed by now. Youll be playing in practically complete silence aside from the interaction noises.

There's so much to do, but somehow it's pretty boring. - Too many characters so you can't walk anywhere without 10 cutscenes you don't care about. - Controls don't feel very fluid or satisfying. - There's a lot of grinding on chores etc that just isn't addictive or interesting. Just not very enjoyable to me. There's a lot of content, but none of it is very gripping.

I am a Kickstart backer for this game, so I received the Steam version via that avenue, but also loved it enough to purchase it on XBox so my daughter can play as well. I believe that it was one of my best investments. the graphics are beautiful, the characters are well designed and relatable, and the story allows for many hours of play. If you like playing casual sim games where you help to evolve the community and make loads of NPC friends, this is definitely a game you want to get.