Review: Pine

What we liked!

• The FIRST game impression: As soon as I launched the game, I was greeted with its perfect ultrawide support, and a smooth and good-looking experience. Which honestly made me feel baffled. The quest lines were a typical adventure like, and my wife who was sitting next to me even laughed about me failing to do the typical things. But honestly, it was amazing.
• The music/theme: Twirlbound did an amazing job in finding music that is tailored towards the game, and how it is supposed to feel. It tends to be happy, and slightly mysterious, all while remaining amazingly chill to play.
• Graphics: This game looks and feels as if it was made by a large game studio. Simply amazing to play, and far most smooth to play too. Even when I gave it the hardest test of them all: Running the game of a simple NAS, it didn’t even sweat. Which makes for a pleasant experience after all, even on low-end machines.

Somewhere between

• Combat: Combat tends to feel quite unrewarding and glitchy. I found myself striking my sword through targets, and having no real motivation to keep leveling my weapons since I got quite a good sword early on in the game. And the upgrades I did to the sword, didn’t really show that much of an effect.
• Quest progression: The game has SOME beautiful places to explore, but be careful to always accept all quests in the area first. Since most of the loot tends to be limited in supply. For example, I found myself raiding a nice watchtower, to then 10minits later be greeted with a quest that required me to raid that specific tower, which was no longer possible. So, the only option was to reset my game progress to an older save I made the night before.
• The emptiness: This game could have been so much more, but if you wander from place to place, you will see large grounds simply unused, with not even little aspects or loot to farm, no materials to pick up.

What we disliked

• The “loyalty” system: Yes, I put the “loyalty” in question, since you need to be loyal towards a said group of villages, but the more you play the game, the more you get forced to swap loyalty villages for different objects, or just simply to do the quest you get forced to do in the first place. Which then resets the loyalty for the other villages. So basically, they don’t award your choice to stay loyal to a single village or tribe.
• The characters: Yes, I am aware that these are “tribes” and are supposed to be the same. But they are EXACT copies of each other. Which feels slightly lackluster. Also, the lip-syncing could have been a tad better. If a certain NPC moves their mouth only once for an entire sentence, then something is wrong though

If you want an amazing adventure game, and if you set your expectations correctly, then you will have a lot of fun playing this game for hours. But as stated above, don’t expect a full “open-world experience”, since that is not present. But I would definitely buy this game again for the hours of enjoyment I got out of it so far.