The charming RPG/Farming Sim Stardew Valley initially wowed gaming when it released in 2016 on PC, offering an experience that is truly like no other. It has since made its way to PS4, Xbox One and most recently Switch, and now the mobile crowd is finally getting a shot at this unique game.
If you’ve somehow not heard about the game up to this point, it’s basically a Harvest Moon-like game where you tend to a farm. You plant and grow crops that you’ll eventually harvest and sell for a profit, and then slowly expand your farm to change it from a rundown dump to an impressive business.
Of course, despite that being where everything starts, that’s really only the beginning when it comes to Stardew Valley. Your farm exists in a world with a bustling little village filled with people to meet and grow closer to, and each of them has their own schedule that varies from day to day. You might catch one character by the lake in the afternoon on one day, but on another they might be spending time at the local saloon.
Fishing is another activity you can take part in to make some decent money, and combat is even included as part of the Adventurer’s Guild. There’s plenty of tasks and missions for you to take on as a part of each of these activities, ensuring that you always have a ton to do but not enough time to do it all in the game’s fast-moving days. The game’s changing seasons will also switch up the schedules of the characters, the crops you can plant, and the activities that are available to you.
It’s a game that has earned universal praise at this point, and for good reason. The big question we have here is whether or not it’s worth checking this engrossing experience out on your mobile device, and thankfully the answer to that is a resounding yes. You control the game entirely with your mobile device’s touch screen, meaning you’ll tap points on the screen to move your character, perform actions and sift through the menus. Nothing from the PC or console versions have been compromised to bring Stardew Valley to mobile devices, making this game just as addictive as it is on other platforms.
The touch controls are also surprisingly solid, even if they aren’t as intuitive or precise as you would get with a mouse and keyboard or controllers. The game utilizes a grid system for movements and actions, so if you’re playing on your phone you’ll likely occasionally run into situations where you move to the wrong spot or select the wrong option. This hardly ever happens when playing on the iPad (which I did for the majority of testing), as the grid is much bigger and allows for more precision.
Managing the various items in your inventory is also handled very well, as you have one row of your items displayed in a column on the left side of the screen. You can select which tool you want to use for any particular activity, though often times the game will automatically switch to that tool to perform the action it is you’re trying to do (like chop a tree, pick axe a rock, and so on). I say often times because it doesn’t always seem to work, as I’ll be tapping the grass to clear it out but the game won’t always automatically switch to the scythe to complete the action. It’s annoying, but thankfully simply tapping on the tool you want to use takes no time at all.
Combat is another area where the touch controls could have potentially been a deal-breaker, but the devs did a good job of coming up with something that works. A new “auto-attack” option is available that has your character swipe at enemies whenever they get close enough, which is good enough to handily take on the lower level enemies in the game.
However, it’s when you get deeper into the mines and start taking on more difficult enemies where this system starts to crumble a little. Using auto-attack will lock you into the action if enemies are close by, and if you end up getting swarmed then you’ll find yourself in hot water quickly. You have the option to switch it off and just take the enemies on manually, but repeatedly tapping the screen for each attack isn’t exactly ideal, either. I almost wish they had the option for on-screen buttons for combat so that you can control movement and attack at once, or even MFi support in general.
It’s also a shame that Stardew Valley doesn’t currently support iCloud syncing, so you won’t be able to seamlessly go from playing on your iPhone to your iPad whenever you feel like it. There is an option to hook up your device to iTunes and transfer your saves around that way, but it’s a chore that shouldn’t have to be done in this day and age. It’s possible that this will be fixed in the future with an update, so hopefully that’s the case.
Despite some slight issues with controls and lack of iCloud sync, the core of what makes Stardew Valley so special is untarnished on mobile. The fact that you can now have this engrossing experience right in your pocket is truly special, as mobile games with this much depth are a rarity. If you’ve played it before I’d still say it’s worth checking out as an excuse to play this great game again, and if you haven’t played it yet then you need to get on that ASAP.
Gaming
Ubisoft says that future Assassin’s Creed games will need more time to be made
As Assassin’s Creed Shadows is about to sneak up on people in November, Ubisoft says that the time between developing games needs to be longer to find the “right balance.” Shadows has been in development for four years, longer than any other game in the series up to this point. That includes the huge open-world epics Assassin’s Creed Odyssey and Assassin’s Creed Valhalla.
Shadows lead producer Karl Onnée (thanks, GamesIndustry.biz) says that the latest AC game took 25% longer to make than Valhalla. He says this is necessary to keep the quality of the series that it is known for: “It’s always a balance between time and costs, but the more time you have, the more you can iterate.” You can speed up a project by adding more people to it, but that doesn’t give you more time to make changes.
Onnée says this has as much to do with immersion and aesthetics as it does with fixing bugs and smoothing out pixels. This is because the development team needs time to learn about each new historical setting: “We are trying to make a game that is as real as possible.” We’re proud of it, and the process took a long time. In feudal Japan, building a house is very different from building a house in France or England in the Middle Ages. As an artist, you need to learn where to put things in a feudal Japanese home. For example, food might not belong there. Get all the information you need and learn it. That process takes a long time.”
You’ll have to wait a little longer for Ubisoft to work on each game. Are you okay with that? In what part of Shadows are you now? Is it interesting to you? Leave a comment below and let us know.
Gaming
You can now pre-order Lollipop Chainsaw RePOP on PS5
You can now pre-order Lollipop Chainsaw RePOP, a remaster that Dragami Games and Capcom both created. You can now pre-order the PS5 game on the PS Store for $44.99 or £39.99. If you have PS Plus, you can get an extra 10% off the price.
The company put out a new trailer with about three minutes of gameplay to mark the start of the pre-order period. Lollipop Chainsaw RePOP is a remaster of Grasshopper Manufacture’s crazy action game from 2012. You play as Juliet, a high school student who fights off waves of zombies.
The remaster adds RePOP mode, an alternative mode that swaps out the blood and gore for fun visual effects. It also adds a bunch of other features and improvements that make the game better overall. You can expect the graphics and sound to be better as well.
The game will now come out on September 12, 2024, instead of September 12, 2024. Are you excited to get back to this? Please cheer us on in the section below.
Gaming
This Call of Duty: Black Ops 6 zombies trailer is way too expensive
Is there really anyone who is following the story of Call of Duty’s zombie mode? We’ve known about the story in a vague way for a while, but we couldn’t tell you anything about it. It looks like the “Dark Aether” story will continue in Black Ops 6, but we don’t really know what that means.
For those of you who care, here is the official blurb with some background: “Requiem, led by the CIA, finally closed the last-dimensional portal, sending its inhabitants back to the nightmare world known as the Dark Aether, after two years of fighting zombie outbreaks around the world during the Call of Duty: Black Ops Cold War timeline.”
Wait, there’s more! “Agent Samantha Maxis gave her life to seal this weird dimension from the inside out.” Even worse things were to come: senior staff members of Requiem were arrested without a reason by the Project Director, who turned out to be Edward Richtofen.
Black Ops 6 will take place about five years later, and it looks like it will show more about Richtofen’s goals and motivations. The most important thing is that you will probably be shooting an unimaginable number of zombies in the head. This week, on August 8, there will be a full reveal of the gameplay, so keep an eye out for that.
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