Lake Review (Shard)
Great idea, poor implementation
Lake is a story-driven game where you play as a daughter who replaces her father as a postman. All actions take place in a small town around a lake. On your way you will meet many interesting characters and situations.
I fell in love with this game at first. Incredibly beautiful graphics in a stylized low-poly style are my weakness. Silence, calm and comfort, that's what I felt when I started playing this game. In addition, a simple and interesting plot complemented the whole harmony. The work of a postman diluted the gameplay and gave time to think and relax, but not everything was as we would like...
The first thing that catches your eye is the lack of facial animation and emotions. This game is built on a deep plot and there is such a huge flaw here. Most of the time the animation is good, the mouth opens in time with the speech, but when the character expresses emotion, it is not visible at all.
The second big problem is the lack of city life and rendering distance. The game has traffic and pedestrians, but they are implemented very poorly. The number of people and cars is extremely small. I understand it's a small city, but they could be increased in the town center. What about the draw distance, it immediately breaks the magical feeling of the game. There are no trees visible on the other side of the lake, only the terrain, although there is vegetation there, if you get close enough. Why you can’t put low-poly LODs of trees or pictures is not clear.
There are also minor bugs. For example, the game map for navigation does not match the real world, the roads are different in many places. Sometimes there are visual errors in game locations. And for some reason, the red flags on mailboxes don’t go up when we put letters there. The animation of the characters sometimes plays crookedly and we can ring the bell while being two meters away from it. There are many such things and this also has a very negative effect on the gaming experience.
The last thing that upset me was the 10 photo limit with the camera and the inability to save those photos. The game has amazing stylized graphics, but we don't have a photo tool. This is the biggest minus!
Anyway, I recommend only buying the base game at a discount. I’ll write about the DLC in a separate review, but in short, this is a terribly boring addition, don't buy it.