Warrior Cats: Clans of the Forest

To be clear, I went into this knowing it would be bad. The Warrior Cats franchise is known for swinging and missing more often than not. However, I didn't realize how insultingly half baked this game would be. Not even half baked really. Quarter baked at best. Still raw at worst. I'm going to break down my unbiased grievances, then let my inner fan take over. Positives: - The environment is truly beautiful. It's relatively expansive and no area looks exactly alike. - The art style for the characters are rather charming and cohesive. - The combat is fun at first, with the animations all being very cute while not being overly cartoony. Negatives: - Glitches and oversights abound. Cat names randomly change for no apparent reason (not just the normal Warrior name changes, like the game itself changes the suffixes randomly.) There are NUMEROUS spelling errors and improper coding leading to cats referring to others as placeholder numbers. Customization on enemy cats floats above their heads outside of combat and when entering combat they don't exist. The animation are clearly unfinished, sometimes snapping into place visibly with no transitions between the idle, or they load seconds later than they should. - Though the pretty world makes you want to explore, the invisible walls you slam your face into is a pretty big deterrent. It's nearly impossible to tell what you can and can't traverse. Sometimes I could hop over small inclines, other times I'd skid right off and be unable to continue. Not to mention the awkward controls where you build momentum like a bullet and when you jump you drop like a rock. - The map you're supposed to use to navigate is nearly impossible to read. It's not detailed enough to navigate your paths. Sometimes you think you're going the right way based on the maps path only to get led into a dead end or an invisible wall that wasn't depicted well. The resolution of said map is terrible. Even the mini map is far too zoomed in so I had to keep pausing to check the big one. - The story is nearly incoherent. With unspecified major time jumps, characters dying offscreen, character names glitching, and choppy dialogue it's impossible to get invested. Your clan's food is poisoned? Well you have to go sniff a rock right now, maybe that quest will continue when you get back- no? Now they're talking about something entirely unrelated? Okay? The story constantly feels like it's interrupting itself. You're even given companions with no in game dialogue explaining why they're with you. They just appear. - While the combat is cute at first it very, very, very quickly gets stale. You can't pick your party members and the ones you're assigned all have the same stats and abilities. Strategy barely exists. You can't even stack effects on an enemy, so your party is constantly overriding the effects of the last attack. And if you're slower than the enemy? Well you can only put an effect on the enemy at the end of the round. The effect then wears off at the start of the next round, meaning it did nothing. Also it doesn't explain what half of the stats do? What does resilience do? What about instinct? It won't tell you, and you won't know! - You're supposed to bond with cats by talking with them. It's a mechanic. You get more abilities for befriending them. You can only talk to them between main story missions and it only sometimes raises your bond. The cats barely say anything at all and mostly spout the same placeholder text if you try to talk to them outside of this time. - Crafting items for your den takes time! Possibly real time? Like, up to 48 actual real life hours unless you have friends visit? But suddenly it jumped down to 9 hours of real life hours needed for seemingly no reason. I'm so confused. - Where's moss? I need moss for crafting tons of cosmetics. I can't find moss. No one tells me where to find moss. This map is huge and I keep getting stuck between invisible walls and there's NO MOSS. - Do you like game setting options? This game doesn't! You can't go into specific parts of graphic settings outside of low, medium, and high. High slows down my computer majorly when bigger games don't so something is really unoptimized here. And if you want to rebind your controls? Tough luck! You can't as far as I can tell. Nitpicks as a Warrior Cats Fan since 2010: - Hey, this game explains NOTHING. You're expected to do your homework going in. You won't be able to follow anything if you haven't already read the books. The Clans aren't explained at all. How is this meant to reach new people? - Every clan is randomly generated EXCEPT for ThunderClan. Those are filled with characters from the books that have custom models and colors. Even in other types of media ThunderClan can't stop being pushed as the main characters. We can't escape it in the books, merch, and now the video game. It's very clear almost no attention was given to the other clans. - The timeline's wrong, because the leader of Thunder Clan is Squirrelstar. Yet SkyClan doesn't exist. And major main characters from other Clans don't either. This could have been fixed if it was an unspecified time with a randomly generated ThunderClan too, but no, named ThunderClan cats had to be there for pandering purposes. - The naming is terrible. You have to pick from a very limited preset list. This is presumably because of the online features it boasts about, but the online features aren't synced. You're not actively playing with anyone at the same time. Why couldn't they just randomize the names when someone sees your cat online? Why's there even online in the first place, it doesn't do anything at all. You can fight other cats that... have the same skills as cats you're already fighting in the main game. And it's not real time, so there's no strategy behind the enemy either. - Customization is bizarre. Your looks decide your attributes in the game, which is already a bit annoying. But there's also very limited fur color selections and some designs are locked behind DLC. - $15 is absurd for the DLC. It doesn't even visually show you what you get. It says it has accessories but doesn't show them on the store page. When you actually put them on they have horrible large VFX that sort of spits out of them for unknown reasons. I tried to put on a bracelet and suddenly ribbon VFX was radiating from the character's paw like an infectious disease. It also adds cel shading in the DLC. That you have to pay for. And the cel shading clips awkwardly with the lighting constantly. In conclusion... this is kind of a slap in the face! $15 would be a more appropriate of a price for the main game, and the DLC should be $5 max with how little it adds. Even my nostalgia wasn't worth the original price. I'm appalled at how little craps the creators gave. As a long term fan of this franchise I'm used to getting let down, but this was really an entirely new level of disappointment. Steer clear of this.