AeonicB

On the one hand, the game is okay. Graphics are nice. The gameplay is charmingly wonky to a fault, and it's hard to do anything precisely. You can spend a lot of time just having fun in your kitchen doing nothing in particular in the Sandbox mode, which I think provides a nice mental break. Low score is because they were selling the game on GOG, and I bought it hoping for the Cakes and Cookies expansion. They dropped support for the GOG version with no olive branch extended, so to speak, to buy it on other platforms, no last patches to at least bring the game up to parity with other versions. So I paid for the last version of the game on that platform, which still advertises the Cakes and Cookies DLC that is never coming to GOG because they literally removed it from sale and dropped support. Thanks for advertising a DLC I can't get, and don't trust them to suddenly stop support of other versions without communicating it.

The game's fine, if you knew what you were getting into from the first game. It's a fairly arcadey experience, with on rails courses that you can do over and over again, learning new things as you go. The graphics look nice, which is important for the kind of game it is. Some of the textures are a let down, but overall not noticeable unless you look at them too long, though a few are readily apparent in photographs, like the texture used for the sawdust pile surrounding Bidoof when its poking its head out of the dam. Grinding up research levels can be a little frustrating, so it's better to take this game in small doses and play it on your downtime, not try to rush through it all at once. Some of the special behaviors seem arbitrary and unintuitive, and I still haven't figured out how to do tasks the game's requests ask for because nothing I try seems to work. But if you go in to this knowing what the old game was like, and how it's now apparently a series, then you're not going to be disappointed. If you go in thinking Bandai Namco is going to shoot for the moon on the first approach to an old series in quite some time, then you are sorely mistaken.