More a neutral review than anything (seriously steam why do we not have this option yet?)

Also I have a tendency to ramble so TL:DR is that its a decent game to waste time on but there is a lot they could do in terms of QoL features and such to make it better. I dunno what their roadmap is like so maybe some of my concerns will be addressed in future but I'm just calling it as I see it atm as of the current update (Brains, Bones and Badges). Maybe wait for a sale if you are unsure.

Critter Cove is basically Animal Crossing except you can be an animal as well instead of being the only human in a village full of animals. Plus you don't need to buy a nintendo console to play this and it doesn't run on a realtime clock system so you don't need to feel guilty if you put the game down for a while. You get sent to Critter Cove to help restore it, you build things to spruce up the place, save shipwrecked people (dubbed 'critters' in this game) which you can invite to live in Critter Cove, repair buildings to open stores which you and visiting critters can shop at.

The people who live at Critter Cove will ask you for things and they even have the gibberish speak that animal crossing villagers have. Explore the islands to find more things to help improve the island etc etc.

Biggest praise is probably the character creation system is pretty robust so can make a lot of different creatures like dogs, cats, lizards, even dragons and such. There is a lot of customisation to be had from body parts to skin patterns and stuff like wings or antennae.

Another thing I can appreciate in this game is all your crafted chests are linked so you can store things in one chest and retrieve them from another just by swapping through the chests to find the one you originally stored it in so saves time having to constantly go back to a specific chest to retrieve it.

Another is that crafting will take from any chests you have (long as you are on critter cove, it doesn't work outside of it) so again saves the trouble of finding specific things.

It's a decent game to waste your time with but I admit there are a lot of things I have issues with, some nitpicky and some I think are valid.

- Biggest criticism I think for me since it can tie into a lot of my other complaints is while having the chests linked is handy, its also very tedious to scroll through them all and you can't reorganise the order of them either. So if you end up building say another one for crafting materials, it will be out of order with the rest of your crafting chests. No dropdown menus either so if you have a lot of chests, it can feel like forever to get to the one you want and you might even end up skipping over it accidentally.

- At present in the game there is no way to upgrade your tools, maybe this is in the pipeline down the line but it becomes very tedious to have to farm a lot of stuff plus the lack of progression in not having that is bothersome.

- Some resources are REALLY tedious to farm like Resin which is needed to make wooden planks and its improved forms and you will need them a lot to repair the stores, houses for your critters to live in and some of the things you craft and when upgrading wood planks takes 2 per plank, you will run out of it really fast. You can craft the stuff sure but that can be a chore as well getting the stuff needed for it.

- Moving throughout the world specifically on your water craft is so slow, you do get an 'upgrade' for it eventually but the difference is so small it hardly feels like an improvement. Some of the places you travel to take quite a while as well.

- Tying into the previous point is that it feels like time moves a bit too fast in this game so you can spent what feels only like a short time out exploring and by the time you know it it's already dark and you've barely explored or done anything.

- Gardening is fine to an extent but Sprinklers need more functionality, like you can build large gardening planters which are 9 tiles big but you can't put a sprinkler in the middle of them to water all the plants around it? Plus the area of effect can be finicky so trying to set up individual planters to work with it.

- Money can be really hard to get in this game and by the time you start earning a decent amount from tourism and such, you've already finished just about everything so not much left to spend it on.

- Menus in this game can be tedious to go through. Wether its your quest log, your crafting unlock list or even in cooking. With cooking when you unlock a lot of recipes, you have to scroll a lot to find the dish you want to make. For cooking at least, some tabs to group them into the specfic food types they are listed under would be nice.

- Speaking of cooking, can be a pain as well since you have to relight the thing you are cooking with every so often and that can couple in with the tediousness of the chest orders to find stuff to light it with. Would like the ability to like throw in a bunch of a material to keep it going until the materials run out.

- In crafting there is some items you can only craft one of a time of like sunglasses. It's an issue cause you can craft a sunglasses stand to sell them to tourists and your own residents but having to craft them one at a time is a slog.

- Finding some crafting things is a pain since while the game does list the items other islands have to salvage, I ended up referring to the game's wiki a lot of find out where things are. Be nice if the game let you highlight on your map the most abundant places to find them.

- It feels like critters ask for things WAY too often wether by approaching you or via the 'request board'. Like bruh let me go explore and salvage stuff instead of complaining for the 5th time that you are hungry or looking for decor/clothing and want me to make you something.

- When building people's places, repairing stores or expanding your own home, a little mailbox thing appears telling you what you need to fix it. But unlike your own chests, they are not linked to the rest of your chests so you have to go to your chests to find the right stuff and it ties back into the chest list problem if you have a lot of them.

- Quests can be a pain to track, maybe this goes into my menus complaint as well? Not sure. But the game only lets you track one quest at a time and in the case of quests that require you to get one or more items, there is no list of items needed if tracking such quests so if you have a bad memory like I do, you will be checking your quests in your journal about 5-6 times just to check what you need to grab.

- I am not really a fan of the critter speak, I know there is an option to disable it but at the same time it then feels awkward without it.

- Last thing to mention is the snap grid system can be very finnicky and won't always allow you to align things perfectly with buildings and the like, I get very OCD about stuff like that so it can be a problem.

Anyways, thanks to anyone who was willing to read all my ramblings here.

I do enjoy the game despite its flaws but I do know the game still has a lot of things it could improve on to make it a much less tedious experience. I know it's still in early access too so some of the stuff I complained about maybe they will fix in future or may already be addressing in the next patch they put out. But I am just listing my grievances for the game as of the Brains, Bones and Badges update.

Feel free to check it out for yourself if it looks good to you and any of my nitpicks aren't as much of a concern to you, otherwise if you err about it maybe either wait for a future patch or even full release or get it on sale.

this is awesone

great game as it should be, exploring, building a tourist attraction village is fun, price is to cheap for a great game, it`s at least 100 hrs to do most stuff