Lakeburg Legacies Review (Princess Bumblelina)
Bro, I've restarted 5 different playthroughs because everyone keeps cheating and breaking up but the divorced moodlet never goes away even if they remarry so everyone's just constantly miserable (which makes this game exhausting)!
The pacing goes way too fast for you to keep up with resources so characters inevitably get pissed, and only getting 100 years max defeats the entire purpose of having a marriage and children mechanic when you can't even go that far down the family line. Honestly a lot of the issues I'm having weren't even in the demo which I was obsessed with and I wrongfully assumed annoying details would be ironed out in the final release, but honestly the release is unplayable compared to the demo which I got way farther in. Other than some ascetic updates, were the delays just to twiddle their thumbs and do absolutely no play testing, these problems seem obvious to anyone who has to play it for more than 10 minutes.
To encapsulate the severity of this lack of foresight, you start of with no house or wood to build a house but have a crippling homelessness penalty which knocks 50+ years of a villagers life span every 90 days but you typically need 100+ days to get enough wood for a house insuring that your first character has a significantly reduced lifespan. Good thing the characters don't matter because the game ends within 100 days. Not to harp on that point again but what a terrible decision that one is, these games operate on getting invested in family trees and you made it impossible to do that with that mechanic.
Also, where is the traveling salesman from the demo? I'm constantly broke and can't afford a new villager that specializes in the resource everyone wants even though I don't even have the building yet. Now every child in the town is born with club foot because the entire village has been cursed for not having enough bread. Wonderful.
I, unlike my thrice divorced netizens, don't believe this game is a doomed endeavor. I think a lot of these issues can be fixed through updates. I was counting down the days for the release and fell in love with the demo, there's a lot of things about this game to love but it needs some serious reworking to the event system and pacing to be playable. I still believe in the vision of this project, most the charming features are still there, they're just buried under some poor game mechanics.
I'm not going to ask for a refund because I'm still holding out hope but your team really needs to take the criticism to heart and get back to work for a patch. If No Man's Sky can bounce back from a disastrous release than Lakeburg Legacies can too!
But at the moment I can't recommend it in it's current state.