Midnight Acres Reviews

I have definitely never known the developer or played other of his games, but I got to say this one has been worth the purchase price for me even though I'm on my 1st run through. I generally like base building, tower defense type games like 7DTD, Empyrion, Space Engineers, SmallLand, Conan Exiles, etc. While this game of course doesn't rise to the level of those, it is better than hundreds of other similar ones in my library. At first, it's hard to get used to the extremely quick day/night cycle. I don't think its adjustable and really flies by. But I think that is for balance since you could probably gather and craft so much during the day that the mob attacks at night would be too easy otherwise. The art style of the enemies vary. Probably asset placeholders to be replaced if he continues to enhance the game into the future. There are some UI bugs that are easily worked around. There are a few biomes and a large enough map. Run speed is very fast, which is nice, so I didn't think there would be fall damage but found out the hard way that there is. I wish the dev well and will check back soon to see if his design choices and continued efforts can make a real gem.

During the day, you'll find yourself managing and growing your farm, which is a staple of farming sim games. This entails cultivating crops and other aspects like resource management and building. The farming aspects offer a peaceful and relaxing gaming experience, allowing players to create and customize their farms. However, the twist comes when night falls. As the sun sets, you're thrust into a survival scenario where you must defend your farm and yourself from terrifying creatures. This switch from a laid-back farming simulation to an intense FPS experience as they need to fortify their defenses, upgrade their weapons, and fight off waves of menacing foes.

I have been waiting for over a month for something as simple as inverting the controls on the mouse. Can't play the game as it is but now its too late to refund. Enjoy my money scab.

Not recommended in its current state. The game has potential, sure, but no part of it is fleshed out in any way. The farming part is bare-bone at best. And there are annoying bugs like targeting farm plots to water if you build them " too close" to each other. Harvesting resources is just tedious. And the night-time defense sequence isn't working right either. There doesn't seem to be any rhyme or progression to the attacks. It should be easy first nights and then gradually become harder. As far as I can tell, it's the same monsters every night. The day is too short. You have barely time to chop some wood, and maybe tend to your farm before the night attacks start. Also, the achievements don't seem to work.

its a fun little game that i got my money worths out of. its alittle empty, its glitchy, achievments don't work and can get repetitive, but for under $10 (i got it on sale for $4) I got my moneys worth for sure! It does have a great concept, and can be pretty rewarding, but what it's really missing is multiplayer so you can have friends join you. at its current state its a 6.5/10 game but if there was multiplayer it'd be an easy 8

Okay, so... getting into the game there is no real instructions to follow. I tried to look up instructions on how to play the game didn't really find anything. I can cut trees but no way to mine stones so I couldn't really build anything, and the first night so many monsters came I just kept dying and having to start over. Maybe it will improve, but...

This action/crafting game gives you a real purpose to your activities – you need to build up your defenses (fences, automatic turrets, food to heal you) during the peaceful daytime so that you can survive the alien attacks at night time. You can also swing your ax during the nighttime to try and protect your farm, but the aliens are pretty tough, so it's much more survivable if you have good defenses. Note that there's almost no hand-holding so expect to die a lot at first while you figure out what you can do, and what actually helps you survive the onslot at night. A nice change of course from the games that constantly tell you want to do every 10 seconds! There also seems to be a fairly large map to explore, 1 hour in I've only seen a small part of it, and there's definitely loot hidden out there. The game kind of reminds me of a simpler, single player Ark Survival Evolved, but with considerably more utility to crafting structures than in ark, and no boring downtime at night. I do wish the controller support was a bit more robust though. The game is definitely playable without mouse and keyboard, but I did have to do some button remapping (and use steam input to invert Y) before all features were accessible.

Currently in its state I cannot give it a positive review. the reasons why is the achievements are not working, the first night is pretty hard (but doable), after the third day the merchant has nothing new to sell. Also, I was able 2 defeat the game in 14 days. I won't go into details, but I have to say there is a lot of potential in this game. The only main problem now is the developer needs to get into gear and continue with some updates. It’s been a while since the game has gotten a update. We shall see if they do.

As of right now I cannot recommend this game. There is clearly potential, but with no news for any planned update and the current state of the game I would say don't buy this. Negatives: Currently it is incredibly difficult to survive the first night. It took me probably three tries or so. The pacing of this game is rushed, the direction is lacking, the hitboxes have a lot of play in them (for enemies and for things like watering your crops), the balancing of resources you obtain versus the amount you need is not quite there (it's not the worst but the jankiness scales with how rushed you are to get turrets and fences down just so you can survive), the farming takes too much time and after a single yield of tomatoes and one yield of three plot's worth of potatoes I just stopped farming, and the information of items and objects is severely lacking. There's no numbers anywhere on cost, sell price, damage, health, nothing. It's all a guessing game. I really cannot stress enough that in a game that advertises itself as a farming game, farming is completely pointless. It's the only means to heal yourself, but the starting tomato yield will be plenty for days on end, and it is impossible to know what the yields will get you or how much money the crops make you, so don't even bother. Positives: The monster design is really cool. Incredibly varied and though they're not monsters you haven't seen before it's really fun. The premise is good, though executed with a sloppy hand, and the mix of FPS and tower defense is really great. The dev is clearly creative, and exploring and fighting are the highlights of this game by far. Summary: The negatives I've listed are easy fixes, if the dev cares to. The game is PLAYABLE, it just currently sucks to do so. So first and foremost I would do this if I was the dev: quality of life and ease of play (at least early on in new games), including things like: increasing the day time, giving more resources for chest finds, decreasing resource cost for bulk objects such as fences and plots, removing the resource cost for repairing your placed objects, SLOW DOWN your enemies, and reduce the initial spawn count/frequency the first few nights, give us numbers for quantifying HP, damage, and sell costs so we can figure out selling and buying, and fix the hit boxes. Literally just do that and you'll fix this game.

Hello all, Firstly i want to say this game has huge potential, talking as a professional game quality assurance tester. Unfortunately, it is not currently close to being up to par in my unbiased opinion. There are so many aspects that not only need to be improved but also completely reworked. I hope the dev reads this whole thing attentively, for the same reason i did not refund this game. I think you can improve, and i think you can learn a lot. I really really want this game to be good, and i think it could be insanely fun with enough work put into it. Im going to list off the things that popped to mind as i played casually without trying to search for bugs or break the game : [list] [*]The farming system needs an overhaul. It is way too long and tedious to water and ferment every plant one by one, to an extent where it is much easier to completely ignore this aspect of the game to get wood, rock and buy stuff from the merchant. [*]Speaking of the merchant, i understand he is called the wandering merchant, however he wanders way too far and wastes a lot of your time just to find and get to him, even by using the map. [*]We desperately need a clock, watch, timer, anything to indicate what point in the day we are. Exploration is clearly encouraged, however, you nearly cannot explore at all before night comes and you are too far to get back in time. Additionally, days need to be longer to make the resource gathering, exploring, and crafting viable in any way. [*]The sprint speed is satisfying considering the lack of time, and the enormity of the map. However, Cave exploration is rendered unremarkable as you can simply run past every enemy, press e on the chest, and leave. I recommend adding a "Kill all enemies" restriction to these chests, as well as better rewards in them. [*]There are lots of unfortunate glitches that need to be worked out, such as pressing escape in any menu such as inventory or the shop will softlock your game and lose your save without exception. Sometimes the audio does not play at all, which is a shame because i think your audio is one of the strongest points of this game currently. [*]The inventory would also need to be reworked, as it currently feels very clunky. I wish when i bought or crafted items, they went straight into the empty spaces of my hotbar. Id love if the hotbar had more slots as well. The click and drag, is tedious as you need to click, stop clicking, move to the hotbar, then click again which can be severely annoying in normal times, and infinitely more so during combat. [*]The game could benefit from a short tutorial explaining crafting, resource gathering, farming and combat. I understand games that don't hold hands and i respect that, but even dark souls has a short explanation of its main features. [*]There needs to be more tower defence aspects, i think you could take inspiration from games such as Plants VS Zombies to merge your farming and defence to an extent as there are so many enemies. [*]The map is pretty and big, however it feels empty as there are not many places to actually explore, or they are all very far apart. I think you could add some more simple cabins, camp grounds, roads, fences and etc just to give it a bit of life. [*]I think detailed damage and HP could be added as descriptions to items and weapons, perhaps also to enemies. [*]I don't know if there is a repair tool or not, i could not find it if so. I really wanted to repair everything. [*]I don't understand why you put so much emphasis on the game being an FPS when there is no shooting, only melee weapons. Perhaps you could lean into the fantastical such as the monsters and make magic related weapons? [*]This game would benefit a flood-worth from 4 player co-op multiplayer in all aspects. It would be several times more manageable, more fun and overall a better experience. Even if the game remained exactly as it currently is, but with multiplayer, it would be much more worth putting in some hours with friends to survive more than 3 days. [/list] Finally, i apologize profusely that i wrote such a long amount of text. I am so incredibly frustrated that i did not have fun playing this game, when the concept was so interesting to me. I know you are a solo dev or small team, and i know its easy to say all these things, when they would takes months of work to pull off. My sincere hope is that you do pull it off, because i think you can. Don't hesitate to add me if you want to talk about it, im sorry again i was so insanely critical.