Apico Review (Ensayia)
After playing APICO for a few hours, I must say it's really disappointing to see this game being offered as a complete title when it is very much in the realm of Early Access.
We'll start with what's good. The game has a very clean and concise art direction. The interface is well polished and navigating the menus is pretty easy. The game world pixel art is charming in presentation and it's easy to move around and get things done.
All that being said, the world feels dead and lonely. The NPCs that exist only serve to blurt out random notions that don't provide any real assistance, other than the old man who gives you clues on what do to with the bees on occasion. The bees themselves just function as items and not at all like living things outside of generic animations when a hive is looking for flowers. They don't need to be fed or even cared for, and while you get special storage containers for them a little later in the game they are just as content to be stuffed in a box alongside your craft items until you are ready to use them. They can't starve, or die, or be harmed in any way. You'll start off by finding a few bees and hives and getting some bits of honeycomb via breeding queens. The honeycomb bits get used as part of the very tedious and boring crafting process the game presses you to navigate through with the built in guide book holding your hand and rewarding you for every small step you take.
Producing crafts from wood is straightforward enough, milling lumber from logs and sticks from lumber with a small mini-game that mandates the player be engaged by moving the stick back and forth in a sawing motion. The charm quickly wears off and you will find yourself running around managing machines to produce the craft components you need just far too much, even considering the semi-automated machines you can make just a little ways into the game.
When you build your first honey-producing hive it needs to have wooden frames for the bees to make honey on. Those frames take multiple components to create and wear out after about three or so uses. The full frames have to be uncapped by another machine, and then have a minuscule amount of honey spun out by yet another machine. After several frames and about an hour of faffing about I had one small vial of honey that was almost worthless. It sold to the shop for far less than the sum of its components and I later discovered you need multiple other machines to produce honey into other products.
I gave up.
Resource management and crafting need a lot of fine tuning. Things take need direct intervention to create or manufacture, take ages to produce, or wear out too quickly before you absolutely need more. Things are constantly finishing too soon or too late, and the whole crafting process lacks any kind of consistent flow. There are also too many crafts, such as all of the house building stuff, that are effectively useless. The game doesn't care at all if you build a house for your production and storage or just leave it out on the lawn.
The aforementioned guide book is the only incentive of progression. There are no other goals than to craft the next thing or breed one of the many combinations of bees to make a new combination, to do the same thing over and over again to check off a list. You get a guide for bees and a guide for flowers once you start breeding, but those are basically just checklists as well. There are too many different resources, crafts, and hives to mind all at once and there's never a sense of control or satisfaction for the very little you get in return.
All of that, combined with the actual bees being one of the least interactive and most boring part of the games themselves, I can't recommend APICO until the developer has had more time to refine the core gameplay loop.