Force of Nature Reviews

I have to say, my man has had so much coffee to keep his stamina up, that his heart rate is off the charts, at his point he can phase through walls like Barry Allen. Judging by how much pie and meat he consumes to keep his health up, he just might actually have the metabolism of the Flash. That is, if the man could move faster than the gear of "Grandpa", he is just a touch away from having first place as the fastest racer in the "Snail championship". My man had a bear chasing him - sprint? oh my, not a chance, I'll just stroll away from that thing. My man has the ingenuity power and mind to build a windmill as of three stories high and make it work, yet he lacks the common sense to place a warmer clothing on his armor. It's armor, or warm clothing, that is the way, no other. Also I think he is as clueless as I am on the topic of "What am I doing on this island?". Yet my good man has some secret knowledge of building a compass from basic earth minerals and imbuing it with god only knows what so that it would show the way to the seven shards of the nature. Traversing through the seven biomes for unknown reasons fighting the beasts of the unknown. Just to get them all and glue them back together with probably something that I do not wish to know, so that you can know that you have finished the game... what happened at the end or the man? only he knows. More in depth, well there be a lot. Not sure how to even cover all of it. Let's start with the basics, the character. You have no idea of who you or where you are, nor you ever will, as much as story goes, there really is none. Just a simple fact that you are on a skull island (because the map kind of looks like one) and you have to find the seven, let's call them elemnts of the nature if you will, and combine them in one, to achieve, well also never to be known, that is as far as the story goes. Sounds bland, yes it is. Now besides the lack of story we head on over to the gameplay and oh boy.. is it slow, I mean really slow. Base line is you have to craft a lot, and I mean A LOT if you want to have the - all so necessary items to move forward. If you have the patience then the game just might be for you, I'm kind of a tolerant person, but there were times where even I was at my limit. For and example to make a Health potion, that come in play, kind of very late in the game, you have to do the following: 1. Dig clay (as long as it takes for the tool in use) - blake the clay in a bottle - 20s 2. Grow patch of Strawberries - 1.40m 3. Grow patch of Rosemary - 2m 4. Grow patch of Salvia - 2m 5. Grow patch of Russule mushrooms - 2.10m, now you have to have at least 4 to grind them into 1 Russule poweder that will take about 1m. 6. Now to get wood (as long as it takes for the tool in use), then you have to dig a bit of clay (as long as it takes for the tool in use), gather honey, that is being produced in your apiary and gow a patch of wheat 1.4m. Now that you have clay, honey, wheat make glue 20s. Once that is done. Make paper with said gathered wood and glue 30s. 7. You'll need some water from your well and some ash, now to get ash you'll need to hunt down a fox, boar or a bear and grind three of the bone pieces into one ash that takes about a 1m. Now you can combine the Water with ash and you have yourself - Ink 10s. 8. Make the potion 40s (or if you have the fancy gear 20s) Congratulations you have made ONE potion. That roughly takes 12min. Now of course I'm being a bit harsh, of course you can multitask and some items bring down the time, but just giving the basic vibe about it. And that's just one thing. Potions come in later on before that, you will need to cook food that demand the same prowess as the potions do, but I do have to say much more less steps for the food items. And trust me, you will need them, especially the ones that give you "stamina" regeneration. Now other items are more less demanding, like armor or tools, most of the intense ones are the ones that keep you alive and going. Going over to the armor and weapons, making them might be more or less easy, using them.. that's a whole different story. For the armor you have - let's place them in three types of classes - one that gives you armor stats, one that protects you from cold and one that protects you from heat and yes, there is an environment damage if you do not have the heat/cold resistance gear. In theory all good, but in practice.. not so much. Why you might as? Well all the biomes after the first one require you to have some heat/cold gear, the problem is, you can only use one, what I mean by that, if you have made your very shiny steel armor you might be able to use only one part of it. A very odd choice, as in some games if you have environment changes you might have an armor slot for said environment and a slot for armor value, like in "7 days to die" perhaps, but in here, you'll very much so never use full armor gear, just because you will not be able to. You can have amulets to boost some of the environment resistances, but only to a degree. So in general some of the armor will be very much pointless, some advanced armor will come much sooner making no point in even making some of the pervious ones. The armor.. is a very questionable part in this game, also one of the game that considers the best armor to be the soft gold armor. Moving on to weapons, well there are, I would say three weapons types. A light weapon, heavy weapon and a bow/throwable item. How do they work, in general depends on how long do you want to play. Now the light weapon in personal opinion works best, it does not deal a lot of damage, but you can move thus dodge an attack, by dodge I mean walk back or move around your enemy. Heavy weapon, more damage - yes, but.. you can't move. You stand there like a tower taking damage, and if you are okay with that, and okay with crafting hefty amount of healing items do go for it. And the third, the bow. Well it mosty works to attract enemies to you. You can't really deal too much damage, or if you do it will cost you arrows that are, well at one point too expensive to make. As much as you can make poison or fire arrows... for some reason they work or better to say do not work the way they should. Poison is rather confusing.. I guess it deals damage over time.. but can't tell for sure, fire arrows.. just more damage. Other than that's thats about all there is to it.. Now that items and weapons are covered it comes down to "stamina" or why the game is slow. The character by default will move, attack, gather very.. and I mean very slow, each action you do drains stamina, to recover said stamina you must eat/drink/use potion that you constantly have to make. Of course over the time you can make new gear and items to speed you up, but that is to a degree. Combine that with the other elements of the game and it drags it all down and makes it so.. so very slow. The last of the elements of the game are building, to keep it short, it's a grid based build. You can make some structures, most of them are with a purpose and only some that are more of a decoration type ones, but in general some of the build ideas are.. again.. questionable. For example there are things you can only build inside of a house or things you can build just outside. Sound fine, kind of.. well you can build a lantern that takes 1x space outside or even craft a small hand held type that takes 1x space if placed outside, but you can't place them inside, inside the only option is to make a x4 space torch.. it just does not make any sense. Also the crafting tables and other things that go into the houses never really feel right, always there will be odd spaces like 1x space left and you can't really place them into the buildings neatly, like the houses were not thought out, each made just bigger, but canceling the idea of any the purpose. Now there are few more things, but that would make this review a book. So I'll just stop here.

Very fun craft and build game! They give you quests to do as well as requirements needed to level up. The enemies are pretty fun and have some interesting sounds lol. Highly recommend!

This game has a unique take on advancement in a type of survival craft environment. You have to meet certain objectives to advance to the next level and get access to better gear. It can be tedious at times but it gives a clear sense of progression that is basically on rails. I have played it through a couple times over the years and find it enjoyable. The sequel is more polished but this game has a lot of effort and time put into creating something a little different that many people would find enjoyable and a breath of fresh air from the same old thing.

imagine if minecraft told you it takes 2 minutes to craft coal, imagine if the progression there was also that a copper axe is not faster than a stone axe, it just allows you to cut another material, screw this, there are so many better sandbox games in the market, this game is cheap but if it was free i'd say i got robbed of my time.

I have no idea if someone got paid off for the "mostly positive" reviews but there must have been a lot of money exchanged and a few BJs to this POS game to that status