Recent reviews by PodRED

Dispatch is a narrative story-focused game in the classic Telltale style, and by several of their former developers; if you have ever played one of Telltale's games you know what to expect here.

The actual dispatching gameplay is good fun, and actually quite challenging to perfect.

Whilst the dispatch gameplay and (most) story choices don't make that much difference to the actual narrative it's still a fun ride and I was invested in the story the whole time.

From a technical perspective switching to the Unreal Engine marks a huge improvement over the in-house engine used at Telltale, although there is an occasional annoying black-frame glitch when v-sync is enabled that does not appear to have been addressed or fixed by any update so far.

The comic-book TV show animation style was perfect.

Finally a shout-out to the cast who delivered great voice-acting across the board and really helped sell the story and make me care about the characters.

Tiny Glade is a delightfully perfect cozy game. Building little dioramas is incredibly relaxing.

Fiddling with all the little details to get it just right is the kind of flow activity that you can really sink into and if you're like me it will scratch your brain just the right way. It gets bonus points as a nifty quick terrain generator for TTRPGs if you're into that kind of thing.

The daily challenges are great when you don't know what to build, and the soundtrack is absolutely on point for the vibe.

17/10

First the elephant in the room : it does feel like the publishers forced a release when giving the devs a bit more time would have resulted in more polish and fewer unfinished features, however overall the game is still excellent. A lot of people seem to have expected Stardew Valley levels of development but seem to have forgotten that Stardew had many years of additional development to add content and features post-release.

Coral Island is a great little game which is extremely reminiscent of Stardew Valley. Whilst it's a little disappointing that several features weren't ready for the v1 release there is *plenty* to do in Coral Island and the dev team are working hard on addressing issues and future content. On the other hand game balance feels a little off and there are currently some disappointing though not game-breaking bugs.

Overall I'd give the a 7/10 for a v1 release. I will revisit the review as and when the developers address balance and content.