Havendock

I played this game to 100% completion, and I can say with certainty that this is an entertaining but profoundly incomplete game. The game loop is addicting, going from scant resource gathering, to humble farming and growth, ending in running a society that runs on caffeine and bird poop. The criticism I levy against this game is due to the fact that I enjoyed it so exhaustively. The bottom line: Havendock is a junk-food burger. My main complaints about this game have to do with cohesion, both in art direction and game design. The art direction is all over the place - mixing smooth models, low-poly models, high texture fidelity and monochrome. The character models are fine, charming even. Their animations, on the other hand, are a selection of smooth Mixamo-esque humanoid animations and Unity Animation Editor programmer art (Especially the animals). The item sprites are a mix of 3D model renders and hand drawn pictures, which further adds to the incoherence of the experience. The photo mode feels ironic. As for the gameplay, there are two main areas where I find issues. Firstly, the game lacks polish. I would estimate that the polish is about 10% complete. There's no sorting in the storage menus, the collision is very wonky at times, there were minor bugs that annoyed me, and a few bigger bugs. After a while, a penguin arrives at your colony, but I was never able to get more than one, despite there being multiple jobs for them. The large penguin seems to have no use beyond a single research item and trading fish for sand. The scientist that arrives and needs life support has no further development after the initial incident. The lady at the other lighthouse that is apparently "the end of the game" gives you a resource that cannot be used for anything. There's a dungeon crawler element that seems like a vertical slice of a completely different game. All of these things and many more seem like dropped threads that I feel should be tied into the greater whole of the game, not just a one-off or a dead end after a great resource cost. The in-game achievements that served as a guide stop appearing about a third into progression of the main island. All the additional islands range from feeling disconnected gameplay-wise, all the way to a complete waste of time with the Astrology island, which leads to a fakeout NG+ (cutscene and all!). This game does NOT feel finished. To me, this game feels like an early access game that barely managed to crawled across the finish line. As for the second area of gameplay critique, it's about resource cost balancing. Many things are too good for their small cost, or near-useless for their extreme cost. The biggest culprit is the Extended Reach research, which costs an unfathomable 25,600 of the Knowledge item. In case you don't realize, this is an insane amount of that item. It genuinely took me 20% of my playtime (about 6 hours) of JUST farming for this research. The cause is that the cost of the 10 research levels start at 25, and each subsequent research level costs twice the previous one. I admit that I was stubborn in wanting to complete every research task, but I couldn't help myself. The second worst culprit are the Longer Desserts and Enhanced Desserts research. This required something like 300 donuts to complete, which - again - is an absurd amount of donuts. Donuts that are eaten up by your settlers unless you mark them as not to be eaten. I don't even really know what desserts do, for your settlers or for you. It's just a useless resource sink. I could go on, but those were my biggest points of criticism. As you can tell, I've obsessed over this game and what I perceive as its shortcomings. Despite all that, I still recommend this game as an excellent waste of time. Most times I like my dinners nice and healthy, a good steak or a rich stew. Sometimes, however, I will enjoy the hell out of a junk-food burger. Just really order way too much food that I know will make me nauseous afterwards, but the instant gratification is worth it. This game is a junk-food burger, and games like this need to exist. There are so many things to love and dig into when it comes to this game. That exponential growth that starts from the smallest actions, like picking up driftwood, and ends in a hundred little workers carrying plankton collected in sieves under the sea, up to a storage box, which is visited by a flying flightless bird that carries it to an island of fishermen that use it as bait to catch shrimp, and that shrimp is used as bait to catch squid, which partially feeds the flying flightless bird, and partially is used as bait for catching tuna, which is picked up by the flying flightless bird and carried to a kitchen that cooks a seafood platter, which is used as a resource for teaching someone how to be a better chef. Imagine this chain, but in the dozens. The game seamlessly shifts from a survival game into a managament sim over the hours. Despite (and even because of) the palpable shortcomings of this game, I had a great time with it.

Honestly there are the bones of a good game here. I would liken this game to Raft if your raft were stationary (and no annoying shark). In fact, I think I enjoy this game more than Raft. That said, it's still a thumbs down. Something like 80% of the design choices are good, but then the Scuba Shack just randomly can injure your survivors even though no other "farm" type building has that problem. Early on I upgraded a building and the next level needed Rope. A pretty simple and necessary item for survival. So what do you need to make rope? Well the standard items that are floating by are wood and palm fronds. You can make a net floor that can catch the items randomly floating by.. with wood and the fronds themselves. It's a net. Visually it's ropes. But to make ropes in this game you need to: go about 66% down the skill tree, unlocking ships and submarines(!), use the submarine to go to the ocean floor, which is basically an empty box, harvest crystals, make turbines and a drill to harvest more crystals, unlock the "Beacon" which ..."generates" "knowledge" whatever that means (it's not obvious from the description nor from looking at the thing itself), use the "knowledge" to research aquafarms, plant some mushrooms underwater and an underwater aquafarm, then twiddle your thumbs because you need spores from the mushrooms but it takes like 90 seconds for a mushroom to make one and can't be sped up, plant the mushroom spore to make seaweed in the aquafarm.. somehow.. harvest the seaweed and dry it, and then use that to make ropes. Perfectly simple and logical, only took me 7.5 hours of playtime. I mean, frankly ropes don't even need to be a thing in this game, I'm not torn up by the fact that the implementation of ropes specifically is stupid. It's just that it points to a person who somehow wanted to make a survival game and totally doesn't understand how survival games work. I kinda hate Raft having played it for a while, but virtually all of the steps you need to do in that game make a fairly modest amount of sense (plastic/wood hungry dev self insert "we couldn't figure out a good way to pressure the player" shark notwithstanding). In fact, the upside of Havendock is there isn't that much pressure. There's a food and water system, but it's fairly benign as long as you plan to make food and water stations. The aforementioned Scuba Shacks need to be reimagined though - remove the injury first and foremost. Really you could just have people get sick randomly, that would make as much sense as how it's currently implemented. The Shacks themselves have two upgrade paths: faster and more chance of injury, or slower and safer. This is dumb. This is a nearly cozy survival builder, not Dark Souls. Don't make upgrades in a game like this with tradeoffs. Just upgrade the building - make it faster, make it safer. Plus, injury means you need a bed and health potions to have the crew member heal. While they're doing that they're not working. So "faster and riskier" is conceptually "faster and slower"? One last thing, which is the first thing: I rolled my eyes when you wake up on one platform and "have no idea how you got there". I mean, you don't have to write Shakespeare to open your story, but "I have amnesia because then I don't have to write anything" is so so so tired these days. Plus it's weird, the first platform you're on is fenced on all sides. You essentially can never enter the water directly (aside from the magical submarine). And yet there are clearly islands all around you even when you first start. They don't even establish that your character can't swim or anything like that. You're just walled off from the ocean, despite gathering resources from it, with.. some sort of green line, I guess. Eventually you can buy a fishing rod... not to fish, but to give yourself more range for your green line interface magic thing that picks up things from the water and isn't explained. Really, this is a game I'd almost recommend. I think the majority of it is pretty good. I'm not even an AI hater personally, but I did feel a few times like the dev just plugged some ideas in to an AI and shoveled the results out to the public, because deep tech ropes and injury Scuba aren't concepts a real person with any experience would think was a good idea. But beyond that I actually liked the seagulls being used as carriers and the overall experience of building the platforms and setting up all the stations and such. It's just, I eventually had to look up how to make ropes, because 7 hours in it still wasn't obvious, and was so gobsmacked by the process that it kinda soured my feeling towards the game.

I keep finding game breaking bugs. like whole sections of the game is not playable. the only way to fix this is to delete your save and try again. Ill try playing this game again in a year from now. if you do not have the same bugs, you might enjoy this game.

Building a cozy little ocean settlement out of floating scraps and wrangling castaway NPCs is very relaxing during the early hours. Automating your production lines and expanding your platform feels rewarding until the late-game progression hits some deeply tedious and confusing bottlenecks. It has a lot of charming ideas for a base builder, but it definitely suffers from rough edges and lack of polish in its mechanics.

Havendock is a sideways thumb kind of game. It does the colony sim thing decently well but doesn't really excel at anything and has a fair bit of jank. I'm leaning towards not recommend for a couple reasons. * The layout of where you can place docks is extremely arbitrary. I'm not sure if it's fixed or randomly generated, but there were several spots in my settlement where I could cut down on travel times substantially if I was just allowed to place a bridge somewhere other than where the game put it. Around half of my possible build area was on the other end of a circuitous winding path from the dock, which is a chokepoint that a lot of materials have to pass through. You do get flying transports but that leads into the next problem. * Transport workers just kind of do whatever they want and ignore things like movement efficiency versus other worker types, storage proximity, or sustaining production. You can't set resource priorities by recipe or building, only by the type of building. You can't reliably assign a building to be serviced or ignored by a specific worker type, the robot workers you have to build for progression can and will carry things across your entire base despite being slower than every other option. The most you can do is prioritize buildings by type, but even then you'll still end up in the situation where e.g. your coffee farms run out of seeds because the dumb workers took them all straight to your crafting area on a different island without replanting anything, even though you moved farms to the top of the input priority list. * Automation besides the transport workers also feels incomplete. The big one is pipes, a couple buildings let you build an upgrade to add a pipe but it only extends a single tile in a single direction. I can't help but feel there are better ways to handle this, especially for the underwater oil wells since each well produces enough crude for at least two refineries but you can only pipe to one. This isn't quite a problem, exactly, since you'll have an easy surplus of regional transport workers underwater, but because those workers are fish there's some major unintentional comedy going on. * Some resources can't be properly automated. Cotton is probably the worst offender - you can only get seeds by purchasing from a vendor, the plants don't regrow, and you can't buy enough to sustain a 3x3 farm, not that you could grow much more than that anyway given the space restrictions where it grows. The only alternative is expeditions, which require coffee, which has nearly the same problems with replanting and space restrictions. You can't get away from needing cotton, either, the fabric it's used to make is a crucial ingredient for a lot of mandatory crafting recipes. There's also slime, which you need to gather personally in an utterly perfunctory combat minigame, but you only really need it for a couple upgrades and the main recurring one (birdhouses) is easy enough to work around by just building more buildings instead. * Various things in the map are unnecessarily annoying or unfinished. The fishing village main building has an open fence in the back that's prone to getting you stuck when walking back to the dock. Underwater resource nodes once depleted hang around forever and can't be removed. You can't build land expansions on the coffee island despite how crucial it is to progression. There's an ice island accessible fairly early on that has uninteractable animals, an empty NPC house, and an empty build menu, I waited all game to see when this would be used but it never was. There's another island that's just a sandbar that you can sail your boat on (yes, on top of the sand) and see a couple sight gags but is otherwise unused. Music doesn't loop properly in most areas and doesn't change if you use any method of travel that doesn't involve a dock, which you will be doing constantly at endgame to save time. Also, and this is perhaps a bit petty of me, but I had the misfortune of playing the game at [i]exactly[/i] the right time to run afoul of a bug that put me in a glitched won-the-game state at around the halfway mark, which gave the achievement for winning but also prevented me from seeing any of the progression checkpoints past that point and resulted in zero use at all for some endgame materials (hydrogen, quarks). This bug was patched as I was wrapping up my last few achievements, so it shouldn't affect new players, but I'd be lying if I said it didn't hurt my experience or that the rest of the stuff I've mentioned wasn't enough for a sideways thumb on its own.

It’s interesting and occupies you for a while but it then loses direction/ momentum. Unlocking each stage doesn’t feel progressive. I don’t feel a reason to return to play

I feel like there's a lot of potential here, and maybe the game really does get amazing later on, but I cannot get past the god awful UI. It looks like it was designed by an uninspired teenager for a compsci class last minute. Awful font, difficult to navigate and displeasing to the eyes. I wish I could get past it to enjoy the management mechanics

这是我在Steam第一次被气到打差评！我建议所有人都别买这游戏，第一，开发者极其不负责，很久不更新游戏内容，基本可以确定放弃更新了。第二，很多冲着多人模式买这款游戏的全部被背刺，多人模式因为有bug优化不好，直接被开发者删除。试问有这样极品的开发者，谁还敢买？