Well, I took the risk. I'm in the second area so far and it's not very interesting. I'm not going to make a final judgment until I encounter the evil meerkats but so far it's too unstructured and the goals feel almost B+-esque in their tedium. Basically it's like Pikmin but much simpler. So far the goals are expanding your underground network to specific spots on the map (fairly uninteresting, only need to give dig orders, no real challenge) and breeding more meerkats (beat up some prey and bring it home until the counter goes to 100%, then "guard" the babies for two days but there's very little to guard them from). Specified digging sites aside I haven't found any points of interest on the map that would make exploration worth it.
To gather food you beat up prey, the annoying part is that giving an attack order on a prey doesn't mean "fight it until it dies" but "fight it until it shakes you off", most prey requires two or three attack orders to kill so it's not order-and-forget and you could basically do it by yourself as well. You can only assign one meerkat to a prey, no way to attack with multiple (they just stand around uselessly) and if the prey requires multiple to carry it home afterwards you have to be around too. Even though some of the prey should be potentially dangerous (snakes, scorpions) it isn't. Prey spawns randomly so there's no need to look for good feeding places.
Sometimes you get encounters with predators, they're also not very good so far. If you didn't post guards the predator will grab one of your meerkats, if you did the timer (20 seconds, plenty) will appear before he does. Then you get another 20 second timer before the meerkat actually dies, if you attack at all you don't lose it. Fighting is just throwing all your meerkats at the target, like prey they'll shake them off so you have to give the order again and again. The dogs I fought offered basically no resistance if you just keep sending meerkats at them, I encountered an eagle once and didn't have enough meerkats to deal with it so it killed my leader (forces you to restart the day) but it still didn't feel like Pikmin where you have to time your attacks and retreats properly. The predators spawn randomly too and if you retreat (all meerkats to the burrow) it just disappears from the map.
The presentation isn't terribly good either, most of the time there's no music (something a game like this REALLY needs and they still had about 100 blocks left on their WiiWare size limit), combat looks awkward, there's no path finding (if a meerkat doesn't get to its goal within a certain time it'll just teleport there so no gameplay impact but it looks very ugly) and the environmental noises quickly get annoying (especially the sound of digging).
It could really have used better pacing, the first area is completely free of threats but you still need to do a lot of digging and breeding to finish it, should really have passed faster. The second also feels way too long for how little there is to it.
IMO 4/10 should be the ceiling for the game. It's even pretty short, there's four areas total and only three introduce new elements (first shows the game basics, second adds predators, third enemy meerkats but fourth is just more of the third). I think I had something like 30 game days on my save when I beat the game, according to the manual one day is 6 minutes so that's 3 hours.
Hell, you'll be tired of the repetition before you even beat it once, why would do that again?
There are no special replay bonuses, it keeps track of how many main burrows you reach so if you're absolutely masochistic you could go for 100% completion on those.
I confirm all points KDR_11k makes but I have some things to add.
There are three difficulties: EASY, NORMAL, EXPERT. And it has three save slots. You can give your meerkat group a name, and you're prompt to name all of you meerkats individually (neat for your casual gaming sister).
I give it a 6/10 - because I like to dig tunnel systems. Unfortunately you lose them all when you advance to the next part of the map, so there's really no point in digging cool underground paths at all. You should just gather as much food as possible to have 40 meerkats as soon as possible to kill those random predators faster. There's no better strategy so far. Well, I hope maybe the games pacing is better on NORMAL or EXPERT?!
The games premise isn't bad, with a nice little intro "LostWinds"-style.
The controls are more complicated than neccessary. Every action needs the pressing of two buttons at the same time as if there weren't enough buttons on Nunchuck and Wiimote. The controlling could have been much more comfortbale, but it's tolerable since there aren't that many actions at all. But still, it's awkward at times, when there's a barrow next to a wall it isn't registered properly so you struggle to get the right perspective to interact with it..
The interface is bad as it's so easy to click those sudden pop-up messages away: like some important tutorial instructions. The worst part: There's no record of those messages, no way of study what you've been told once you clicked it away. Also clicking on "restart the day" by accident instead of "save & continue" can happen if you're a little trigger happy.
The music is good though, and the ambient sounds fit to the savannah atmosphere as does the vast and empty landscape. Yeah, it's more of a relaxing game, a very casual animal sim / meerkat sim with mostly useless gameplay elements (like digging watch holes instead of tunnels or naming your 40 meerkats individually). Much of the stuff is just there so you have something unnecessary and unrelated to do. It's not a screensaver like My Aquarium, but it's not enough to be a strategy game in any way at all: Too much extra stuff, but lacking in the meaty parts.
The graphics are decent, with nighttime being the worst part. You won't see much even when you brighten up your tv screen settings to the maximum. It's best just to wait the 20 seconds until the sun rises at the start of each day, or try running almost blind to the next area where you have business to do. The extreme slowdown in some parts and the teleporting meerkats (because of bad CPU pathfinding) is just a minor annoyance and not gamebreaking.
Well.. enough of my experience with the game. I'm halfway through with it (after 4 hours) and I might replay it on HARD later. I will be much faster on my next playthrough: as much as I like digging complex and practical tunnel structures and exploring the redundant corners and nooks of the map it's apparently useless. So I'm just going for the prey and main waypoints - the only goals in the first half of the game.
I was going to say I don't remember any difficulty settings either! I'm not really into sim games, so I was putting on my "objective" hat with that review, though I did enjoy what I played. There was something addictive about linking tunnels, but yes the controls were a bit arsey, though thankfully they could be figured out.
I think it's a decent first effort for Studio Lapland who traditionally seem to do support work for other companies rather than full-blown games development. Hopefully this does well enough for them that they can up their game!
Yesterday the game froze after a serious framerate drop : it was my first encounter with the rival meerkats. Well, I can only advise you to let go of all buttons when the framerate drops to zero (several second halt, almost freeze-like).
I now tried another strategy: Let a few meerkats spread and guard the area where you're doing business. It really helps since you're not getting attacked instantly by those predators. Instead you have plenty of time (20 seconds) to finish digging tunnels and command your meerkats all at once (hold C button) into their tunnel system. It's great because the eagle is some annoying predator that often kills one meerkat; on top of that you don't need to waste time gathering food to produce more meerkats.
Anyway, Lapland Studios first work? I don't think so. Lapland Studio is only the publisher it seems. The developers of the game are INARIA INTERACTIVE.
Now... progressing. I'm on the fourth part of the map, the game crashed once more. Just random freezing from unpacking compressed data I suppose..
Also it's the second time that it didn't save properly. Last time I thought I didn't click on "save game" properly and I had to replay 5 days. But now: for the second time already!!! This can't be coincidence. This is some serious annoying glitch! The game just refuses to save after long periods of playing or maybe after doing some certain things!!
And another thing happened that was very annoying: I'm clearing all the maps 100% but I couldn't clear the 3rd map 100%. There is no real order which waypoints to take over and suddenly I triggered the last one, but there where others left. So, I missed some big parts of the map.
This, combined with the freezing and save-glitch are serious flaws and drag my score down to a 5/10. And maybe even with that score I'm a little generous. Well, I can't help but still like playing the game. At least until the 4th part of the map is done and there's nothing more to go back to.....
No problem. I think the last thing you'd like to see are glitches, especially after your experience with F&FP...
Uh, you know about that? Yes... F&FP is the glitchiest WiiWare game I've played so far. Permanent freezing was just one of its bugs. Today I talked with a friend about the glitchiest WiiWare games and we came to the solution that freezing is one of the most annoying bugs. We listed the few WiiWare games that have a bad habit of freezing: Family & Friends Party, Tales of Monkey Island, UNO and Lead the Meerkats. There are a few other games that seemed to have the problem, but they only froze once, so we don't list them up here.
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Topic: Meerkats impressions yet?
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