Hello Kitty Island Adventure Review (CactusJuce)
I was super excited for this game, I love all things Sanrio and I liked Animal Crossing so I was really excited for what seemed like a really fun crossover.
I played for about 2 hours, and I don't think I'll be playing anymore. You discover the entire map and all of the characters insanely quick (I know there's visitors you can get but the rest of the game makes it not really worth it to wait around for the other characters you can see) and that alone took a lot of the excitement I had out of the game. The map is HUGE yet you can just go and discover it all in 20 minutes after doing that very first Chococat quest.
Pros:
- Insanely cute. The characters, outfits, character customization and home decoration is adorable and I loved it. Hit it right on the head for what you'd expect from a Sanrio game.
- The quests are pretty fun when you actually get to do them. It's actually really fun to do the quests of all the characters, especially when they interact with others.
- Game worked completely fine for me. I run a low-mid end pc and this game worked so smoothly, zero issues with bugs or freezes or anything like that. It's only a few GB so I guess that's what you'd expect.
Cons:
- THE GRIND. This game turns into a grindfest of grinding for days on end to level up character friendships. About 1.5 hours in I was already starting to find things to craft just so that I could develop friendship level because theres no other way to do it. Again, haven't played very long, but I started looking online to see if a lot of the game was going to just feel the same way in just grinding gifts and it seems like I have a pretty popular opinion on it. Also what do you mean I can't do anything with Cinnamoroll until FRIENDSHIP LEVEL 14??? The max is 20. Like hello that would take weeks???? Rip Cinnamoroll fans ig
- Gift Giving. Because the game is focused entirely on the leveling up of friendships with characters through giving gifts, you'd expect them to give you a decent amount of friendship considering you can only give 3 gifts per day to each character. Wrong. You can probably get the characters to around level 5ish without it starting to feel like a mega grind, but after that you have to wait days (because you can only give 3 per day) just to level them up and get new quests. You don't get all that many quests per character level so after you're done the quest you need to just find materials, make gifts, give gifts, and repeat for a couple days until you actually get to do a quest again.
- Slow progression. Literally only because of the limited gift giving mechanic. It force stops your progression because what else do you do while you can't give characters gifts? Gather materials so you can make more gifts for the next day? then what? It's just a horrible system that you wouldn't expect out of a $50 game (Canadian dollars)
- Limited customization. Unlike animal crossing, there's really not a lot you can do to change the island, and the amount of furniture and clothing that's actually cohesive is abysmal. Eventually you can unlock some cute outfits and get some nice furniture to make your home look nice but here's a shocker! They're locked behind the character quests you need to spend days grinding for! Who would've guessed!
- It's a mobile game at heart. I can see how this went absolutely crazy on Apple Arcade because mobile games are something you're able to come back to everyday and not spend hours and hours on everyday. It feels more like a time sink for iPad kids rather than a properly designed game.
- Price point. $50CAD is a little high for how little the game actually lets you do. It's fun for the first few hours but I really can't see myself playing this for more than maybe 8 hours total. For everything I've said above, it's just not really what I would expect out of a game with a higher price point.
Overall I'm pretty disappointed with the game. For the record I did EXPECT it to be a bit grindy like how animal crossing eventually gets, but I didn't expect to face it within not even 2 hours of playtime. If you don't mind coming back to do little things everyday just to progress the game then go for it. I just personal do not like the gift giving mechanic at all and I heavily dislike the grind that's needed to even follow through with giving gifts. Just not for me.