Recent reviews by Nymbil

Love it! I have played since release, and still play it. It plays well, has a good selection of mods, if that is what you are into, and has pretty decent building mechanics. The mounts/pets/thralls are fun, and a nice addition. Great game if you like building and exploring. Plenty of decent battle too. It's not the toughest battle by survival/sandbox standards, but is engaging enough to be fun. Definitely worth adding to your game library if you like games like ARK and Valheim.

Updated Review after Southwest update Feb. 20 2025:

Still wish I could give a neutral review, but my review is now going from positive to negative. I have waited since early access to see major issues fixed, but enough is enough.

Update is not worth $10. Yes it's a new map, but nothing else really new except a couple vehicles. Sure it's great that you can buy more than one ranch, but since none of them have more than one small farm plot, what's the point? I was hoping to have one large farm to grow crops, then one ranch for animals, but nope. One ranch has enough room for everything, so unless you play with friends, multiple are pointless.

The animals dying with full troughs is still a problem, which just means you still can't spread out your animals into large pastures unless you want to spend all day visiting pastures to make your animals eat (which does not always work). It makes the bigger lots pointless.

Fence snapping is still poorly done. Building still has bugs and issues. Every issue I listed in my first review is still there. I would much rather see fixes than a new map with annoying sandstorms that seem to be pointless.

Original review:

I wish they had to option for neutral reviews.

I like the game, it can be fun and relaxing. I do have issues with it however.

1) I wish they would fix snap points for the fencing. They should snap from either end, and also snap to building pieces so you can properly do barns with paddocks.

2) The biggest thing they need to fix is the range from the player for animals to eat. If you are at your ranch, they should eat. Not all of us play with others, and since there is no pause in single player, if you have to go afk, you have to save and exit the game, or your animals will die simply because they didn't eat. As an example, my father is elderly and needs care, I had to get up to help him. I was by a horse barn I built, behind it is a dairy/meat animal barn. All the horses were fine while I was afk, but nearly everything in the dairy barn died. I was only afk for about 20 minutes, but I was too far out of range (even though the dairy barn was only 16 fence lengths from me). I rage quit that day lol. Animals should not die in range of a full silo, when the player is at the ranch.

2) They need to work on bugs! Random things will stop working, like building pieces not wanting to place, horses stop earning xp while training and you have to exit the game to get it working again. Hives will stop adding to frame percentage, and the honey extractor can sometimes run for days in game and frames will stay at 100% and no honey will be produced. The list goes on and on. Any game function can just stop working at random.

3) Controls are crap with no controller support. Trying to line up with trailers is a pain because the vehicles go from 0 to floored in a second, so you just keep over shooting the trailer hitch. It also makes backing trailers a pain.

4) Horse controls are pretty bad, If a horse over sleeps and you have to wake it up, it goes into "drift mode" where it is like they are sliding on ice or something. I had a horse that kept sleeping during the day and became unusable until I restarted.

5) Building is pretty crap. If you play games like Conan Exiles, ARK or Valheim, you will not like the building. There are no posts, so no way to support a roof without a wall or wall frame. Those have to be placed on foundations, so all your animal shelters (except the ugly prefab) have to have wooden floors. It's not very realistic. Stairs only go up 1 wall height, so you have to put a stair, then a full sized ceiling piece, then another set of stairs. There are also no straight stairs that don't require attachment to a foundation. Building is just very unimaginative and very restrictive.

6) Achievements often require doing things over and over to get it to count. An example is "Humane Methods" the one to use the stun gun on a cow. The stun gun is buggy. You have to get it in exactly the right spot on the cow to count, something that is much easier said than done.

I do like some aspects. The cooking is fun (for a time), the details like the ovoscope and husbandry are nice, and the environment is well done.

I considered long and hard about this review and if I should give it a positive or negative. I got the game on sale. Had I paid full price, it probably would have been a negative review. There is just not enough content, and the game plays more like a beta. It is just not worth full price. I have just over a hundred hours in. I have restarted 3 times. On this current play through, I have worked on achievements. I have 1 left I can do, to earn 1 million dollars. I really have nothing left to do but raise animals to make food to sell, breed and train horses to sell, and check my oil wells from time to time. I am not sure if I am even going to continue at this point. There is just not enough incentive to keep playing. There are much better building, hunting, and farming games out there.

One achievement I can't do. It requires co-op play, and I play solo.

What's not to love! Exploring, building, bosses, and smacking goblins with maces. All the viking goodness you could ever want. I still look forward to every update, and still have fun building and exploring after over 1500 hours.I played a lot of hours vanilla, and am having a ton of fun with Odin's mods at the moment.

If you like survival builders, you will like Valheim

Right now, I cannot recommend this game. It still needs a ton of work. I like grindy games (I played ark on official servers), but I have a feeling the devs have never actually tried to play their own game. In 3.7 hours of game play, I couldn't even get the materials needed to finish the starting tasks.

In real life, fiber can be gathered from numerous types of plants and trees, but in this game, you have to look for small plants, each one only giving you one fiber. They are few and far between. Everything in the start takes fiber, and a lot of it. In over 3 hours, the only things I managed to make were a campfire, one foundation, 1 wall, the base control unit, the bow four arrows, a shirt, and an animal trap (in hopes of getting chickens to get feathers).

The animal trap requires two fruits to bait it. So far I have only found fruits in loot crates, and only three. I bated it to get me one chicken, which only yielded two feathers. One feather only gives two arrows. You can pick your arrows back up if you can find them, but good luck. Aiming with the bow is nowhere near realistic. You can't sight down the arrow to have any idea of where it is going to go. One of my tasks is to kill a small animal with the bow. I have no more fruit to get another chicken, so unless I get lucky and can catch one by hand, I have no way to get more feathers, so have to hope I can kill something with 4 arrows (yeah right).

I will check out the game again once it has had further development, and edit this review accordingly, but have little hope for this game at this point.

Update: May 5 2025 - I am changing my review to DO NOT BUY! The game itself is okay, but Snail Games and Wildcard do not care about the fact that they keep sc***ing over their players and making down right horrible decisions. Just check Youtube for a video by LtBuzzLitebeer titled :ARK's Publisher Just Said The Quiet Part Out Loud." That video says it all. I will no longer be supporting Snail Games or Wildcard. I tried giving them time to follow through with what they promised, but so far I am still waiting on the expansion maps I paid for, while watching tons of content players have to pay for being released instead. It was bad enough when they shut down ASE servers to try to force players over to ASA, but trying to force paid content on players who have already bought a remaster, is just plain horrible of them to do. The list of bad decisions on the part of Snail Games and Wildcard is ever growing. Just avoid them.

Update: Got an RTX 3060 12GB card and now it looks AWESOME!!!!! Plays even better of course :) My video card is the only thing I have updated since my original review. I can now play with the graphics set to high and it plays very smooth.

Original review below:

I play on a potato
AMD Ryzen 5 3600
32 GB of DDR4 @ 1045MHz
GeForce GTX 1650 4GB

I should not be able to play it, but it plays great. I have to play on low graphics, but I get no lag, and it actually plays better that ASE in a lot of ways. For me, graphically, it is comparable to ASE on max graphics, so I am happy.

Best part so far is that unlike ASE, I don't have to wait for big bases to load in, and deal with dinos falling through the floor because of it. I like the new building system, and the other changes.

Hopefully someday all get to upgrade from my potato, but I am not complaining, even with low graphics.
I have over 4000 hours in ASE, and I am sure I will have at least that many in ASA, considering I logged 18+ hours in the first 2 days I owned it. :)

2023 review update: Well, they updated to version 2, which appears to be the same as their other game Eden Island (no idea why they have 2 identical games). Version 2 is still rough. You can't kill any of the predators in the game, so you die and lose everything a lot. When you respawn, the only thing you can get back is the starter knife and hammer that they start you with. You lose everything else that was in your bags.

It starts you on a little island with a huge crocodile sitting in the only spot to get plant fiber. You can't come close to killing it, so you have to just swim to the main land in order to be able to do anything.

It takes a stupid amount of materials to make anything. One arrow will cost you 5 iron ingots. In what world does that make any sense? It is why you can't kill anything. All the dangerous animals have stupidly high health and armor compared to what you can make and use against them. It is just pointless to even try because you will spend hours getting enough mats together, to make what you need to kill 1 predator.

In the process of trying to kill one predator, you are going to die, most likely more than once, and lose everything you just made to try and kill the animal. The least they can do is make things drop in a bag so that you can get back all the stuff you spent a ridiculous amount of mats to make.

In it's current state in version 2, it is just an exercise in frustration, and not the least bit fun.
I would rather start fresh in ARk, and spawn in in the far north. I would have a better chance of survival than I do in My Island.

Original review: This game is still is early access after nearly 4 years, and instead of finishing it, they rebrand it as Eden Island, another EA game. Eden Island looks like a carbon copy of this game, but with multiplayer and improvements. I bought in early on, to support the game, because I liked the concept. Now I feel ripped off because they just moved on to their newer/better version of the game. The least they could have done was admit they couldn't do everything they promised with this game, and given EA players of this game a discount on the new version or something.

I am enjoying the game so far. It plays well, and I haven't encountered any bugs while doing the campaign. The graphics, even on low, are great. I am enjoying it just as much as the first one

The only issue I have so far is, I think they way under estimated the graphics requirements of the game.

It says minimum is:
AMD FX 8370
Memory: 8 GB RAM
Graphics: (4GB VRAM) NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1050Ti

It says the recommended is:
Ryzen 5 1500X,
12 GB RAM,
Graphics: (6GB VRAM) NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1070.

My pc specs are:
Ryzen 5 3600
32 GB RAM
4GB GTX 1650

The only thing that doesn't exceed the recommended specs, is the VRAM of my video card.

You would think I could play on medium settings, but nope, I have to play on low. If your PC doesn't meet the recommended specs, forget playing the game. The recommended should be more like the minimum, if I try to play on medium, then turn extra stuff like rain down to low, it lags so bad it is unplayable. Even with it on low, and a good cpu cooler. I have to watch my cpu temp. I can play games like New World, ESO, Kingdom Come Deliverance, Planet Zoo, and Horizon Zero Dawn on max settings with no issues.

Oldie, but a good one. Always loved this game, and still play it from time to time, even though I own 2 & 3 as well. Sure it will never measure up to newer games like Planet Zoo, but for games of it's time, it was, and still is the best.

Ignore the reloaded version, it sucks. The reloaded version is basically the mobile version, so the controls suck on pc.

Very well made. Frontier always does a wonderful job with builders like this. I have both Planet Zoo and Planet Coaster and love them both.

The animals in Planet Zoo are very well done. The animations are spot on, and the whole enrichment item system is very well done. Real zoos do their best to keep their animals engaged and entertained, and it is nice that Frontier thought to include that aspect of zoo keeping as well. It adds to the realistic nature of the game.

The controls are intuitive and easy to learn. Building is free form and I love that you can use natural barriers like cliffs and water ditches to contain animals, just like they do in real zoos and wildlife parks.

The fact that the animals can become stressed from too many visitors, and that there are ways to counteract that with things like one way glass, make it more realistic that other zoo games I have. Most zoo games only care about the space and terrain you give an animal, not the full picture of maintaining their stress and social needs as well. Planet Zoo does this very well.

Having the game on Steam makes it fun to build buildings and enclosures and share them online with friends.

Kudos Frontier. Keep up the good work!

2023 review update: Well, things have not changed. game still plays like an alpha. The devs should be ashamed of themselves (they just dropped the game like a hot rock). If you can pick it up for under $2, and like punishing, grindy, survival games, give it a go. Otherwise, pass. It has massive issues, and battle is a joke. You will die, a lot, for stupid reasons. They did increase how many mats you get from harvesting, but it still takes a stupid amount of materials to make even simple things, so it made little difference.

2021 review update: My original review was in 2019, so I decided to try the game again to see if it is any better. The answer is no. They did make getting leaves easier, but early game crafting is still crap. The constant freezing seems to be fixed, but that is the only improvement I see.

My original review is as follows:

No, just no. It is so bad, it doesn't even warrant more than that, but given that I hate non descriptive reviews, I will elaborate.

It takes a stupid amount of materials to make simple things, like 3 stones, 10 sticks, and 2 rope to make 1 stone axe, which cannot be repaired. The repair kit takes iron ingots, so why would you use a repair kit on a stone axe? Stone is fairly easy to get, but trees are stingy. Trees only give a few sticks, 2 to 10 wood, and a few leaves. It takes 3 leaves to make 1 rope, so you will have to cut down a few trees for 1 axe, or in the case of your first axe, run around at gather about 10 of the very sparsely placed bushes. My first axe took me about 20 minutes to get the materials for, because I couldn't find hardly any sticks on the ground, or bushes.

It took 12 trees to make the first box I made because it takes 5 planks. One plank takes 3 wood. The trees kept only giving me 2-4 wood, even the largest trees I could find. Then the box only had 10 storage slots. Stone only stacks in stacks of 20, sticks in stacks of 25, wood I never got a full stack because I hardly got enough for what I needed, so no idea what it stacks at, but I still filled that first box in no time.

Horrid translations make the game funny, but pathetic as well. One of the storage items, that looks like a chest of drawers, is listed as a commode. Most people know that to be a a piece of furniture containing a concealed chamber pot, not a piece of furniture to store items in.

There are no instructions at all. I made a fishing pole and the description just said to apply the bait, but not how, and to cast it. It did say to hold the left mouse button to reel in the fish, so I figured it was left click to cast. It said to try and throw it out further, but not how to do that, and nothing I tried worked.

I got attacked by a snake. It took 10 hits with a stone spear to kill it, 10 hits!!!! It is just a freaking snake!!!!. Sure it is a large boa, (that somehow poisoned me even though the model is clearly a boa) but 10 hits is crazy.

For how long this game has been in early access, the movements of the animals, and your character's arms while doing things, are horrid. The animals are stiff, and move faster than they should, for how their legs are moving, so it looks more like they are gliding or sliding across the ground.

The list goes on and on. If I had paid more than $1.90 for it, I would be getting a refund.