Dinkum Complete Review: 100 hours played and I can't put it down

Channel:

BreadGod Gaming

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10,400

Published on September 16, 2022 5:28:17 PM ● Video Link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m1_cVfpu__M

Game:

Dinkum (2022)

Category:

Review

Duration: 12:09

913 views

30

My comprehensive overview of gameplay and mechanics of Dinkum and what I think of the game (I love it). Talking about each feature in this early access version, multiplayer / coop, and hopefully enough information for you to decide if it's worth the buy for you.

Thanks for watching and hope you have a great day. If you like my video, would you please like and subscribe. If you have any questions put them down below in the comments and I'll do my best to answer them or make a video for you. More Dinkum videos are on their way as well!

My text review of the game:
Highly recommended for players new to the genre and those familiar with animal crossing, story of seasons, stardew valley type games.
Dinkum is set in the Australian outback and as a friend of the island owner, you're tasked with developing it into a paradise of your choosing for city residents to come and relax in. It has the typical features you'd expect this genre with terraforming features to change how your island looks, ability to invite villagers/townsfolk to open stores there and live on your island, crafting of items and harvesting materials to do so, farming and cooking, fishing, bug catching, raising farm animals and even hunting wild animals. So it's a really relaxing and fun life simulator so if you're new to the genre it's a great game to open you into.

For comparison, there is an energy bar and it plays out like story of seasons where as you do tasks / activities it depletes, but you can eat food to restore it and work into the late hours of the day. Time is not locked to real time, so you can progress multiple days in one play session and it ticks about two seconds of game time per real time.

Some of the stuff is more polished than other games, like while diving for critters ('deep sea' creature) you can see what you're catching so it's more aesthetic, terraforming is available from day 1 for you and your friends, multiplayer load screens are super quick and you can pop in and out of a friend's island, you can decorate your house completely and not just partial (story of seasons), text scrolls fast / can be skipped so you're not wasting time on more menial stuff if you don't want to.

Townsfolk are all store owners that provide products or services, like furniture, hair cuts, farming supplies. There's no generic villagers that are like your friendly neighbors, unlike animal crossing. However, you can interact with them to become friends by doing tasks for them and they'll occasionally give you gifts and messages in the mailbox.

Some of my favorite features are that it has wild animals like the kangaroo or crocodile and the crocs are hostile and can attack you while you're in the wild, so it makes it really seem like the dangerous outback of real life Australia. There's deep mining where you and friends go underground into a big mine that has tons of ores and materials and even small treasure rooms to find goodies, similar but better and more detailed than the mines of story of seasons. There's vehicles that you can craft and each person could be on a motorbike and guys could explore your islands together. He's also working on multiplayer housing so that your friends can have a permanent house on each other's islands.

The game is early access so there are a few bugs but they're pretty minor and usually it's because you've done something that would sensibly make the game glitch, like rapidly going in and out of a house with multiple people might cause one of you to glitch up. The developer is really responsive though (it's also only ONE person) and fixes things pretty quickly, especially when they're big game-breaking things. To add on this, he also implements features that we, the community, ask for pretty quickly as well. Like opening the menu before the update would not pause the game, so he added a pause button so you could pause the day's progression or buffing farming experience since it used to be a slow grind. So the trajectory of the game development is really positive. There's a limited number of furniture and character customization at the moment but that might/will probably increase over time.

Some things you'll notice though are like multiplayer can be a bit lacking after you've all progressed to the 'end game'. So it's much more casual than say an mmo or rpg game and I think that's just a fact with this genre and not each game. However, I'm more hopeful for this game since the developer is so responsive and we could suggest multiplayer ideas, like sea journeys to new island together or like a persistent server option to work on an island together, etc. So all in all despite it being early access, there's plenty of content that is familiar to the genre and plenty that is new and polished for you to experience both solo and multiplayer. I highly recommend it and it's definitely worth the price ($20+tax).

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