Decent framework, but the cinematics, dialogue, and monsters all get pretty stale quickly. There are a lot of "WIP" places you come across, and the main story has you running back and forth between areas you've already been to (while getting attacked by far weaker TemTem) most of the first area.

Local or global chat doesn't seem to be in yet, but somehow chat is in for trade screens. You have 4 emotes to communicate with outside of that. Strange.

It seems you can trade TemTem, which is kind of cool, but when higher players come to newby land and offer lvl 30 or so basic monsters from the next few zones for 200-500 coins I can't help but wonder how hard money is to find towards the end-game. It seems you only get it when battling NPC trainers, so far of which you can only battle once.

***Review Update 4/1/24***

Chat still doesn't work. When I asked about it on steam forums I was told I violated community guidelines by necroposting.... the post was from 26 days ago and was the most recent on this issue that no one has found a fix for.

The starter area is identical & things still aren't explained well in-game. You pretty much have to Google everything to not wasting TONS of time and effort making poor choices. The grind through the first island wasn't as bad as I remember and it seems like Tems level up faster than they used to which I don't mind.

I'm on the second island working through that part of the story and I hope I find the skates soon to get through the red crystal parts on the 1st and 2nd islands but I'm not sure I want to or even care... There seems to be a lot of time spent walking back and forth across maps to get a quest, talk to someone, then turn it in. Most of this dialogue can be skipped, but there are some dialogue options that lock you out of rewards without having any sort of prompt letting you know this... most of the ones I've found "seem" like the right or a plausible response to someone talking but the NPC will just refuse to talk to you after that point. I remember this being in EA as well so I can only assume it is intended to make players pay attention to bland dialogue?

It's "done" as much as it will ever be, but what is there is a solid single player experience. I have yet to find anything that even requires I interact with another person, so the choice to make it multiplayer, without chat is a weird one.

There's a lot of other monster collector type games coming out this year too which is likely why they've chosen to stop new development on this live service game. A dev in steam forums did say that when they have to eventually take the servers offline they're should be an offline singleplayer version available.

Decent framework, but the cinematics, dialogue, and monsters all get pretty stale quickly. There are a lot of "WIP" places you come across, and the main story has you running back and forth between areas you've already been to (while getting attacked by far weaker TemTem) most of the first area. Local or global chat doesn't seem to be in yet, but somehow chat is in for trade screens. You have 4 emotes to communicate with outside of that. Strange. It seems you can trade TemTem, which is kind of cool, but when higher players come to newby land and offer lvl 30 or so basic monsters from the next few zones for 200-500 coins I can't help but wonder how hard money is to find towards the end-game. It seems you only get it when battling NPC trainers, so far of which you can only battle once. ***Review Update 4/1/24*** Chat still doesn't work. When I asked about it on steam forums I was told I violated community guidelines by necroposting.... the post was from 26 days ago and was the most recent on this issue that no one has found a fix for. The starter area is identical & things still aren't explained well in-game. You pretty much have to Google everything to not wasting TONS of time and effort making poor choices. The grind through the first island wasn't as bad as I remember and it seems like Tems level up faster than they used to which I don't mind. I'm on the second island working through that part of the story and I hope I find the skates soon to get through the red crystal parts on the 1st and 2nd islands but I'm not sure I want to or even care... There seems to be a lot of time spent walking back and forth across maps to get a quest, talk to someone, then turn it in. Most of this dialogue can be skipped, but there are some dialogue options that lock you out of rewards without having any sort of prompt letting you know this... most of the ones I've found "seem" like the right or a plausible response to someone talking but the NPC will just refuse to talk to you after that point. I remember this being in EA as well so I can only assume it is intended to make players pay attention to bland dialogue? It's "done" as much as it will ever be, but what is there is a solid single player experience. I have yet to find anything that even requires I interact with another person, so the choice to make it multiplayer, without chat is a weird one. There's a lot of other monster collector type games coming out this year too which is likely why they've chosen to stop new development on this live service game. A dev in steam forums did say that when they have to eventually take the servers offline they're should be an offline singleplayer version available.