Ooblets need more time to become great

It has never been a dream of mine to own a small farm, where mysterious cooing creatures follow me, until I saw the first trailer for Ooblets in 2017. The colors, music, and adorable visual style drew me in the second my eyes made contact with the cute little things, helping players cultivate.

AND Ooblets it is an agricultural game, in essence. You get a shack to live in that you can upgrade and decorate, and you make most of your money by planting crops, growing them, and ultimately selling them. You interact with quirky people to learn more about Badgetown, the game settings. It is the collecting element of Pokémon type monsters that makes Ooblets both of them cute and unique, but not enough to complete the game in its current state.

Ooblets can be found in small herds around Badgetown, and people living in the city have their own ooblets that follow they around. Turns out ooblets are a way of life in Badgetown, and you’re going to need some.

Instead of fighting these monsters, you make them dance against each other using a card system, similar to that of Kill the needle. Each battle has a goal for each side in terms of points, and you score by playing cards to make your ooblets perform different moves to polish their characters, stun enemies, or earn points to win. All Ooblets have unique cards with special abilities, ensuring that you will want a wide variety of creatures in your party if you want to succeed in your dances to raise a strong work team for your farm.

The ooblets themselves go into “oobcoops” on their farmland, and will tend their crops and keep debris away to make their job a little easier. They are lovely, and I love to see them working hard, making sure my crops are watered and there are no weeds along the way. When they’re not reeling behind their character, they’ll put on little straw hats and tools to make sure their plants stay healthy.

Image: Glumberland LLC

Most farming games make me want more stamina, or scratch the remaining few minutes of the day as I try to make a long list of things. In OobletsI spend much of my time going to bed early because I’m not sure what else to do.

There were many days in the game where I checked my crops, talked to the townspeople, looked for food in the city, and then spent the rest of the day napping to quickly advance to the next virtual day. I often had to wait for specific crops to grow to progress, so I was left waiting with little else to do.

Sometimes it is also difficult to interact with elements or enter buildings unless your character is looking in the right direction or standing in the exact adequate space, making even simple actions painful and frustrating. There were errors ranging from “that’s fun” to “this makes the game unplayable”.

At one point, he was in a themed dance battle where our ooblets could only use their special abilities. This would be a pretty fun fight, if I weren’t facing an enemy that had no damage dealing abilities and could only stun my ooblet, locking me in an impossible-to-win fight that I couldn’t amend. Another error caused my screen to go completely black, frozen until I restarted the game. The list goes on, making this release seem a bit early, even for early access.

The music, character design, and ideas behind the ooblets are so enchanting that it makes me want to enjoy the game more than the game itself allowed me. However, I’m going to expect that for now, and I hope things have improved once it’s out of early access.

Ooblets It will be released on July 15 on PC and Xbox One. The game was played using a download code provided by Glumberland.