Review: As Far As The Eye

What we liked!

• Graphics:  To start of “lightly”, the graphics in As Far As The Eye are just absolutely STUNNING. Loads of different characters are extremely detailed. And to my delight, I noticed that it wasn’t just a plain copy paste of others, they all have a unique touch to them. Whilst being detailed, they are not “overdone”. Many devs seem to fall for this, but luckily this isn’t the case here. The best example would be if you zoom in on your camp while your workers are nearby. You can see them do smooth and cute actions like chopping wood, all whilst your detailed bison has spinning entities around itself and other funny aspects.
• Tasks: You have an amazing amount of tasks that you can occupy your little workers, and they specialise in these specific tasks after time. And with a vast amount, I do actually mean it takes a while to manage them all. You can be hatching stone, wood, food, baking … Each of these are unlocked at certain lengths of gameplay.
• Music: There isn’t too much music in this game, which I can actually appreciate since you need to focus a fair bit here! But for the parts where you are blessed with some background tunes, you truly get pushed into the magical mindset which is present in the game.
• Progression: I was so pleased to find out that, if you manage to complete a whole map section, you don’t just need to restart in the next one. Once you are ready to make the jump to the next map, you get the option to stock a limited amount of supplies on the back of your workers. You need to puzzle them in a way you fancy, since it’s a rectangle that needs to be stuffed. But if you like challenges, pick nothing. However, I genuinely advise to take food and other rare materials, but find out for yourself.

Somewhere between

• Explanation/campaign: The game has a rather lovely campaign mode, yet somehow, I wasn’t quite satisfied. The campaign feels more like a glorified tutorial, which is quite needed, since trying to play the game without completing this, will soon land you with starving and dead workers. That being said, I found myself puzzling too hard about what I actually had to do next in the campaign to continue forward.
• Controls: As mentioned above, the controls are great, but they could be so much more. I found it rather annoying that I had to do multiple clicks. Having a button dedicated to ‘move worker here’ would make a huge difference. Notice that this is a mild hindrance, the rest of the control system is well thought out.

What we disliked

• Identity crisis: My biggest complaint about this game would be that it seems to be having an identity issue. It tries to a) give you a laid back feeling, while also making you struggle as much as possible, and b) it tries too hard to look good, and gave up many other convenient placements for things like a good HUD, intuitive movement, a simple map system …