Little Dragons Café is a handheld/console (Switch) ported third person adventure game where you are challenged with endless harvesting quests while trying to raise a dragon. In some ways this is a bit of an attempt at ripping off Stardew Valley, but with better graphics and much worse, shallower gameplay. A Stardew Valley ripoff with better graphics and the ability to raise your own little dragon from an egg should be a slam dunk, right? Nope. Let's see how the managed to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory.
From a technical perspective, the game doesn't meet basic minimum requirements that most PC gamers expect as standard.
The game features lazy low-polygon "retro" assets, making this look like a barely functional 3D game from the mid 2000s. It's unclear why the developers weren't able to arrange high quality, high polygon count contemporary assets for the game, and also irrelevant... what matters is that this looks bad as a result of their decisions, a compromise PC gamers shouldn't have to put up with. A lot of work went into stylising the assets to cover up this defect so it won't look quite as offensive as other low poly/mobile/console games do. Regardless, this is far from the cutting edge visual experience that gamers deserve.
The controls and game handling are notably very clunky and unsmooth here. It's janky and unsatisfying to play... and any experienced gamer will tell you, the handling, responsiveness and general gameplay feel of the control scheme must be well polished for this kind of game to succeed. You get stuck on things, moving around is awkward console-like stuff where your view camera (mouse) is detached from the movement keys. I honestly don't know how console peasants survive, but I guess that's why they have to use stuff like aim assist. Anyway, the overall control scheme is something the developer seems to have phoned in, with little to no apparent gameplay testing. They dropped the ball on this one.
Because this is a console game, it carries a number of deliberate design deficiencies. Compromises were made to cater to the inferior console gaming appliances that the game was designed for. These are unfortunate compromises and limitations that PC gamers shouldn't be forced to accept, but it's evident that PC was a second thought for the console-centric developers. The game is deficient as a result of these choices, and would have been so much better without the handicaps that designing games for consoles forces upon a game. Once more, console peasants have made gaming worse for everyone.
These technical defects push this game below acceptable standards for any modern PC game.
While the technical problems are enough to ward off gamers (and to no small extent they have), the real core problem with this console game is just that it isn't at all fun. There's a long, plodding, mediocre VN component you can't escape. Gameplay itself is just pure frustrating, as you wrestle with the console peasant controls and discover 99.999% of the game is just repeatedly harvesting junk to try fill your days quota. There's no save-at-will component so you need to plod through a whole day just to save the game, ugh.
So the game comes up with a fail grade on both technical execution and gameplay design and polish. But wait, there's more.
This carries the preposterous price tag of SIXTY US BUCKS, that's right, more than AAA pricing for a D-minus Nintendo Switch console port. No wonder gamers avoided this like the plague.
If this is the kind of game you really want to play, just go play Stardew Valley. While the graphics are worse, the gameplay is 10 times better and Stardew is just a fraction of the price of this.
