Apico Review ([SAP]CommanderA)
Ultimately I would recommend this game, but only if you really like games that make you grind, and/or if you have a strong nostalgia for the old beekeeping mod from Minecraft.
When I say grind, I don't just mean having to go out and chop trees for wood, rocks for stone, and harvest hives for honey; I mean even in the UI. Do you want to scrape a frame from a hive in order to get both honey and byproducts to sell? You will need to literally pull down a scraping button in the UI. Want to saw wood into planks? You will need to move and twist a UI element in a circle. It is like this for quite literally everything. The ultimate goal in the game, as I saw it, wasn't to collect all the different bees, butterfly species, and flowers, but to get to the automated crafting stations.
As soon as I saw how long it would take me to get there, I stopped being interested in this game. I don't mind grinding out hundreds of breeding bee pairs in order to get a new type of species to advance the game. I don't mind collecting wood, leaves, and other items to feed butterflies to get more caterpillars, or collecting a bunch of flowers and seeds to try and crossbreed them. That stuff is pretty fun, and if you focus on that, then this game can be great.
Unfortunately, there is a heavy grind to all of that to begin with, and if that was everything, I think that might be ok. But when you have to individually saw each log into a plank by clicking and dragging the UI element back and forth three times, or have to keep the honey harvesting device constantly spinning for it to work, that is where I draw the line.
I can see some people getting a lot of enjoyment out of this game; and I did enjoy it for about 20 hours or so. After that, I tried to keep going, but just couldn't do it. I would give this game a very lukewarm recommendation. I really want to like it and keep playing, but I just can't bring myself to do it. If you are going to buy this game, either try the demo and see how you feel about all the mechanics. I didn't try it unfortunately, so I don't quite know how far it goes; but you should be able to see what I am talking about in it.
If you don't want to try the demo and just get right into the game, I would highly recommend that you do not get it at full price; wait for a sale.