Another Farm Roguelike Rebirth is another farm roguelike by the creator of Another Farm Roguelike. While I see many people claim that this game is barely different to the first one I have to disagree. From my personal experience I think this feels like a proper sequel, not a remake, not a remastered version, it's a new game with the same core gameplay but heavily expanded and refined. If you haven't played the first game, let me explain how this works. You own a piece of land but you have to pay off your debt at the end of each week. You have to last several weeks depending on the difficulty until you win. In order to make neough money you can plant and harvest crops, raise animals, mine ore and smelt bars, craft a multitude of different items. There are so many different things and strategies you can follow but most will come down to your selected character and what perks you get hroughout your run. When you start a run your will only have a tiny piece of land that is full of stones, trees and bushes, you can use your tools to clear those up but using tools costs energy. Energy is limited every day but there are ways to raise the maximun and regain energy. Some actions don't cost energy however, planting or harvesting crops is free and most crafting is as well. Like in any farming game, you have to water crops until they are fully grown but you can place sprinklers to help you and place bee hives to speed up the process. Animals need food to produce their goods, each animal having their own crop they will eat. You can place a variety of buildings that help you on your farm like furnaces to smelt ore or fishtraps to automatically fish for you. Every time you place a building the resource cost for that building increases, so you cannot fill the entire map with bee hives and collect honey for free energy. Every item you produce or collect can be sold at the shop. The prices for items vary each day, so it's best to hold onto them until they have a higher price. Additionally you can buy new seeds, animals or resources in the shop but most of the wares are locked until you upgrade the shop. Using your tools will give you experience that allows you to level up eventually. Every new level you can select of three random perks, these perks can have great synergy with your characters abilities or with other perks. Sometimes you might want to change your strategy because you got a very good perk. Additionally you 3will get a new quest every week that, if you finish it, gives you a permanent buff but if you fail it you get a permanent debuff. The quest system is... problematic in my opinion. You have to select between two and you might not get something you can actually do which sometimes forces you to choose which debuff you can tolerate. I hope the developer reworks how quests work at some point, I like that you get a good reward if you finish them but I would like to decline taking any quest if I cannot do them. Your tools will also gain experience as you use them. Once they have enough you can decide to pay some resources to upgrade them. Interesting here is that each tool has three different upgrades and those also have their own two different upgrades. These upgrades can increase the drop rate of items, reduce energy cost or do other effects. I like how flexible this system is to allow you to get thje right tool for the right job. In order to maximize profits there are even more helpful mechanics. Cooking allows you to create food that can be either sold directly or consumed for a buff, some of those are even permanent and stack! Alchemy is another way to buff yourself, you need ingredients and vials that you can craft yourself. Lastly there are also different biomes. You will eventually run out of space on your tiny island so you will have to buy a new area that connects to your land. These extra areas are part of different biomes and each biomes has their own special properties and access to new resources. Opening a biome for the first time also unlocks new buildings and crafting recipes, which opens up more possibilities. A mining build will most likely want to go to the mountains first because of the high ore and gem yield while farmers might want to open up the swamp or jungle. There is funnily enoguh also a candy themed biome with fantasy animals that you can raise. One thing that this game nails perfectly is the character selection. There are different "professions" you can select from. Each profession has theior own bonus that they get when they level up. This can be something simple like getting more maximum energy but can also increase the price of sold objects. Some characters are really interesting like the Pirate who does not get any money from farming and instead gets coins from breaking any item. The value of those coins increases by the number of objects you hjave destroyed which creates this chotic playstyle in which you break down anything and maximize your energy so you can break even more. There are a few things that I don't like however. The game is extremely complicated which is cool because you have so many mechanics to play with but the game does a very poor job to ease you into the depth that the game provides. This is especially apparent once you reach the second week. The first week requires only 2500$ tto beat bin in the second week it's 50.000! If you do not use evry tool at your disposal you will utterly fail and the game does not explain well enough how everything works. The second major issue I have is the UI. It's a lot better than in the first game but it's still very... bothersome. For example consumables. To use a consumable you have to scroll through the tool bar at the bottom until you find it, click on the consumable to select it and then rightclick on your land before scrolling back to your tools. Why can I not just open my backpack and conmsume the item there? The backpack is much better structured, I see all my items at once instead of just a tiny bar with a few of them. In general it would be helpful to just select an item from your backpack, close the backpack and then use it in the game. The last thing that annoys me is about fishing, Fioshing requires water, duh, but while your starting land is completely surrounded by water, you cannot use your fishing rof or traps there, only if you are lucky and had a lake spawn on your randomized land. Or worse, if you don't want to fish but start with a giant lake on your starting island withj not enough space to do any sort of farming. There is also this weird bug that you can break items on land that you haven't bought yet. I hope the developer adresses some of those issues, I don't think he will change the Ui but some of the functionality of it could be possible. That being said, I still enbjoy thjis game very much, the amount of content I get here is enough to justify my purchase and the asking price is appropriate.
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