Everyone needs a suitable balance to the fast-paced everyday life. For some it’s the after-work beer, for others a glass of wine and still others just drink alcohol. Meanwhile, a large part of humanity also plays video games. However, many of them do not belong to the hardcore gamers who grew up with Half Life, Tekken or Grand Theft Auto, but to those who, for a long time, thought such games were children’s stuff or are simply too young. So most of these normalos didn’t start gambling on the PC or on the console, but on the smartphone. It’s not primarily about reflexes, story or high scores, but about employment and relaxation.
But as I said, everyone needs relaxation, which is why games like Stardew Valley, My Time At Sandrock and Animal Crossing are very popular with both hardcore and casual gamers. In these games we can build our farm in a relaxed manner, meet a bunch of friendly characters, the dungeon crawling is never too demanding and generally there are few negatives in these worlds. And that’s exactly where we end up at Coral Island. After all, the game from the developer studio Stairway Games doesn’t really do anything new, but that’s exactly what it wants to do very well.
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The comparison with Stardew Valley is not only obvious, it is so obvious that the game could initially be dismissed as a clone. Because apart from the graphic style, many things are very similar to the mental model. This is very soft, colorful and friendly, but looks quite chic.
Flora and fauna are always present and are influenced by wind and weather. The fact that the characters in the game are animated, but each one comes with hand-drawn versions in the dialogue window or the character information, gives the game a special charm.
If you succeed in gifting, then the affection of the respective character increases. Source: PC Games
But let’s first come to the problems of the Early Access version: The animations themselves are sometimes a bit stiff and when we move through the world, changes in direction seem very choppy. This is perhaps due to the somewhat cumbersome control, which was previously only possible with a mouse and keyboard.
Controller support could help here. Targeting objects, gates, people and animals is also difficult. The trigger area is sometimes so small that you just have to click on it until it works, following the principle of trial and error.
The placement of buildings also works according to the same scheme. In the test, we could only build the chicken coop after we ran into a wall we had built. There was enough space, but for some reason it wouldn’t work.
An unintentionally funny translation
However, the worst thing at the moment is the translation. It’s like running the game’s entire script through Google Translate without checking the result. This creates involuntarily funny situations when “Road Map” is changed to “Street Map”, “To Ship Milk” is simply “Schiffmilch” or “Game Saved!” “Game saved!” becomes. Even the development studio called “Stairway Games” was translated to “Stairway Games” without further ado.
Here again “you” was translated with “euch” instead of “du”. This happens often and is unintentionally funny. Source: PC Games
This should definitely be fixed, although of course it caused a few laughs in our preview session. Otherwise there are still some unfinished areas or missing textures in the game world, but that’s not too tragic. Apart from the problems mentioned, Coral Island is in solid condition and works very well.
