Amber Isle Reviews

Fun game that you can take as seriously as you like. there are some timed aspects but these have minimal punishments in my experience. While this game could definitely use some optimisation and polishing, what is there is very solid! characters are cute, and the gameplay loop is slower paced and relaxing. I will say the tutorial is pokemon kinds of long so be prepared XD.

Nice, cute little chill game! If you want to play a game like animal crossing I highly recommend this one

First and foremost this game is simply adorable. The character designs are all cute and likeable, and it really pulls off the "Animal Crossing but it's Dinosaurs" vibe extremely well. The character creator is also very good! Unfortunately, I find the gameplay to be too simple, and the game itself to be a bit to janky for me to really enjoy actually playing it. It's a nice time to interact with the characters, but outside of that there's really not much here for me personally. If it's enough for you, or the gameplay is secondary to the charm, then this is still a good time, but if you're looking for a charming game extremely similar to this with much better gameplay, check out Potionomics!

I like this game very much, it's cute and easly accesible. I do, however, believe it needs more updates regarding repetitive gameplay, movement and the abbility to custumize your island cheaper, because, AS IS, the game is very grindy and demands a lot of time and effort, doing the same thing over and over, offering little to no changes.

Played this game once, enjoyed it enough but now I can't even load the game. It just gives me a black screen. Have uninstalled and reinstalled several times and verified the files. Nothing has worked, so I can't even play it. Very disappointing since I was extremely excited for this game. :(

Refund was denied. the character customization that got it popular is EXTREMELY limited. the only slider in sight is one for how dark the colors are. The dlc is just a bunch of shirts that break the 4th wall. Performs like dog doodoo, even at the lowest settings. 3/10, would not recommend, not even on sale.

I wanted to play this game so badly, and I wanted to love it. I really did. I only got about an hour in before the stuttering and lagging and near-crashing drove me to giving up and refunding my purchase. At a glance, it looks so cute and fun. But it's painful to try to slog through the drawn-out tutorial and then dealing with all of the performance-related issues on top of that. It just isn't in a state to be played right now. It needs a LOT of work done to it so it's playable and it needs content added. It feels very empty and hollow as-is, even just an hour in. There doesn't seem to be much substance. Maybe I'm wrong, but it just didn't feel like a completed game. There also aren't many character customization options and the clothes look awkward on some of the bodies. I can't, in good faith, recommend this game in its current state. Maybe if the devs put in the work needed to make it perform decently, it would be a different story. That alone is enough to warrant a do-not-play rating.

Overall, this game just feels unfinished. The overall aesthetic is cute, but there are lots of issues with clipping, camera, etc. I just think there are better cozy games out there. The gameplay loop is also not as fun as I expected it would be.

Things I like: - The overall gameplay reminds me of MySims, which is an underappreciated experience. - The art style is cute & visually appealing. - The music is well-done, fits the prehistoric setting, and reminds me of the old RARE games like Donkey Kong 64 & Star Fox Adventures. (Coincidentally, both RARE and Ambertail Games are British studios.) - Each of the Paleofolk have unique personalities that keep the world interesting & deep--nobody feels "samey" nor like they're fitting too many unoriginal stereotypes. - Each Paleofolk has speech bytes that perfectly fit their personalities & accents. For example, you can hear the Alabama drawl in Axel, the nasal French of Rusty, and the pretentiousness & snobbery in Jophrey. I hope these actors got a raise if they didn't already. - Hazel is the funniest, best character ever. [b]I want her to be my wife.[/b] - The story is simple, but neither cheesy nor humorless. - The Paleofolk are surprisingly biologically accurate, such as the female dinosaurs not having breasts, the distinction between "hatchday" & "birthday", and Jophrey not being a Jurassic-Park-style interpretation of [i]Velociraptor.[/i] - The island deserves an expansion. Maybe a future DLC? I'd happily volunteer my fursona as inspiration for a [i]Pachycrocuta[/i] Paleofolk. Things I HATE: - This is the most unoptimized game I've ever played. I have premium hardware (Ryzen 5900X w/ 64GB of RAM and a Radeon 7900 GRE), yet Amber Isle on Low settings runs SLOWER than Cyberpunk 2077 on Ultra settings. It appears to be performing too many unnecessary tasks, as if it's making no use of culling, causing it to stutter & chug constantly between 40-70 FPS (I can get 90+FPS with Cyberpunk on Ultra), and reset my character's animations every few seconds (made obvious by suddenly bouncing tails). The effect is most egregious when entering Kem Kem Canyon on a windy day. There have also been instances where the frames drop so much that it forces my character to walk slower and cancel sprinting. Things I don't like: - This game did not launch in a finished state. Publishers! Please stop doing this and just delay your games if the devs need more time. - The game feels like it needs some form of multiplayer functionality. - Character models clip & distort themselves in distracting manners. The worst examples include Adi's fangs clipping with the inside of his mouth, Adi sometimes getting a massive underbite, characters like Barnaby having irises that clip inside their sclerae, Scout's pupils constantly looking square due to an improper mesh / texture, and most clothing options for the player character clipping with each other (and sometimes body parts like ears) to the point it looks ugly. - Z-fighting on landscape textures. - V-sync doesn't really work. The presets also have default names instead of corresponding framerate caps, so I don't even know which one does what. - The "Scythe" is not a scythe, it's a sickle. You don't need to be a sword expert to know that. Get your terms right, Ambertail! - "Compactify" is not a word and the sorting feature for items doesn't appear to sort according to any definite pattern. - The animation layers can make characters do weird things. For example, Benji can do her "approval" animation while sprinting, causing her to look like she's shaking her hips while running at 30mph. Coral's "approval" animation stacked on top of her idle animation (most obvious upon a successful custom shop interaction) causes her to jerkily sway like a stiff metronome. And Pepper's "approval" animation stacked upon her idle animation makes her rock back-and-forth like an Autistic kid. - There's a bug in the character creation system that disallows you from selecting certain options until you load a preset. - Some part options in character creation look like they can be combined, but aren't actually. For example, the mammalian back mane & front tuft cannot be equipped simultaneously even though there is more than enough room on the character's head for that to be possible. - Instead of sitting down in a chair, Gwen T-poses. - Despite the game having a good sense of humor, there are too many anti-capitalist jokes. - Some Paleofolk get less character development than others when they deserve more. This is most obvious with the characters that only have one quest assigned to them such as Russel, Rusty, and Gwen. - Determining the sexes of Paleofolk is needlessly difficult. For example, I didn't know until halfway through the game that Benji is a girl, nor until AFTER completing the main story that Raven is a girl. There is no Mars/Venus symbol on Paleofolk profiles indicating what sex they are, forcing me to pay more attention to conversations to figure out their sex. Normally, I'd just check to see if a character has breasts or pronounced eyelashes, but not all female Paleofolk have pronounced eyelashes, and since the developers decided to honor biology (which I consider to be a positive), none of the female characters have human-proportioned breasts. Most of them can't have breasts anyway due to not being mammals. - The camera is frustrating, especially in tight corridors where there is no unobstructed LOS between the viewer and the player character. - Paleofolk often get themselves stuck in inaccessible areas. - Paleofolk frequently complain about the store layout and the game doesn't specify how to stop this from happening. - As charming as Rusty is being a well-meaning, blind ceramacist; his character doesn't make sense. He's French, but doesn't go by a traditionally French name. He's blind, but is perfectly capable of following the player at-speed, navigating the shop & looking at items therein, and having opinions on decorative items (i.e., the blind can't see, and evaluating decorations requires sight). - Some character lines are missing or broken. In the museum, Barnaby repeats the "holding out on me, that is so unlike you" line even when you give him a treasure. When going to Basil's shop for food, he says nothing at all. When going to Penn's shop, his lines are so short that you hardly hear his speech bytes. - Finding treasure is a pain. - Eventually, you gain money so quickly that there's no point to saving it. I'm a multi-millionaire after 80 hours of gameplay and there's nothing expensive enough to warrant having millions in the first place. Conclusion: Amber Isle is not without ever-present mistakes, but is a good-enough indie game to give a chance to. I hope Ambertail & Team17 will put more effort into optimization & bug fixes for this game. As mentioned previously, it also deserves an expansion.

Managed to lock myself out of my 20h+ save via a very repeatable glitch during the tutorial of the game. Sent a bug report, heard back, and when I asked for a followup 5 days later they told me I they couldnt tell me anything and that I would have to "keep an eye on our social channels for any updated regarding this issue". Knowing how often this game gets updated I'm less than hopeful i will get those 20h back anytime soon. Sucks because I literally just got to the 2 final areas :/ sour taste in my mouth.