Earthling's Undertaking
Last updated: 2025-07-25
- Engaging, content-rich gameplay with diverse exploration
- Enjoyable sect management and flexible turn-based combat
- Crucial alchemy system and strategic combat
- Poor guidance and frustrating overall experience
- Tedious disciple and sect management
- Low overall game quality and performance issues
Emotions
Players are frustrated by the game's unfinished state, critical bugs, and poor optimization, leading to wasted time and money. Specific issues include unintuitive UI, tedious management tasks, repetitive grinding, and progression-blocking bugs, all contributing to a feeling of being cheated by the developer's perceived abandonment of the game. The importance score is reduced by 90% due to signs of review bombing, as the 'developer abandonment' cause is highly emotional and lacks specific details about the game itself, appearing across multiple negative emotions.
Disappointment stems primarily from the developer's perceived abandonment of the game, leaving it unfinished and unpolished, failing to reach its full potential. Players are also let down by a lack of depth in various systems, missing features, unengaging story, and poor UI/art design, which collectively diminish the overall game quality and immersion. The importance score is reduced by 90% due to signs of review bombing, as the 'developer abandonment' cause is highly emotional and lacks specific details about the game itself, appearing across multiple negative emotions.
Players express satisfaction from general enjoyment of the game's core gameplay loops, particularly in the early stages, and finding good value for money. The game appeals to fans of its specific genre, and players find satisfaction in mastering its mechanics, effective character building, and the overall game experience despite initial rough impressions.
Anger is primarily directed at the developer for abandoning an unfinished game and implementing negative updates that worsen gameplay, such as removing automatic features or making crafting harder. Players are also angered by poor UI design, unintuitive combat displays, and major balance changes that invalidate character builds. The importance score is reduced by 90% due to signs of review bombing, as the 'developer abandonment' cause is highly emotional and lacks specific details about the game itself, appearing across multiple negative emotions.
Players express hope for the game's future, desiring continued development, polishing, and the addition of new content and features. Despite current flaws, there's optimism for the game's potential to improve through future updates.
Verdict
Mostly negative
Summary
Positive 30% · Negative 70%. Score: 70 / 100
Positives:
- Players generally find the game enjoyable, addictive, and rich in content, especially for fans of cultivation and mythology genres. It offers a solid foundation with promising potential and a good initial experience.
- The game offers diverse exploration and resource acquisition methods, including town trading, raiding other sects, and disciple wandering. These features contribute to a dynamic world and efficient resource gathering.
- The sect management system is a highlight, providing an enjoyable experience of running a sect and cultivating disciples. The remote control features for sect operations are also appreciated for their convenience.
- The turn-based combat system is well-received for its flexibility, strategic depth, and elemental interactions. It's considered relatively simple to grasp while offering sufficient challenge with proper leveling.
- Alchemy, artifact crafting, and planting are well-developed and enjoyable activities. While leveling disciples and crafting can be time-consuming, players find these long-term cultivation aspects rewarding.
Negatives:
- Players consistently report a lack of clear guidance and intuitive design, leading to confusion, excessive trial-and-error, and a generally frustrating and un-fun experience. Many core mechanics are unclear, requiring external guides or extensive experimentation.
- The sect management and disciple cultivation systems are overly manual and tedious. Players feel like 'nannies' or 'tool-users' rather than leaders, constantly micromanaging disciples' basic needs, breakthroughs, and equipment, which detracts from the protagonist's own progression and enjoyment.
- The game's overall quality, including graphics, art style, and combat visuals, is perceived as rough, unpolished, and below expectations for a full release. This contributes to a general feeling of the game being 'dead' or 'lifeless'.
- Players frequently experience performance issues such as lag, freezing, and slow map traversal. The movement system on the large map is also criticized for being clunky and inefficient, leading to a lot of wasted time.
- Finding necessary materials and alchemy recipes is a significant pain point, often requiring extensive searching without clear guidance. The randomness of alchemy outcomes and material drops further exacerbates this frustration.
Gameplay:
- Alchemy is crucial for progression, especially for breakthrough elixirs. Players can blind-refine elixirs using five elements, and quality (low, mid, high grade) is determined by fusion. Specific talents and high-grade ingredients significantly improve alchemy outcomes.
- The game features turn-based strategy combat with a timeline system, emphasizing skill cooldowns, stat stacking (spell power, attack, critical hit), and a five-character party setup. It combines elements of traditional cultivation with accessible strategy.
- Talents are vital for character customization. Players can acquire, upgrade, or remove talents at the Daoist Temple using merit points, with the ability to refresh random talent options infinitely. There's a limit to the number of active talents.
- Spirit roots influence initial resistance, damage, and resistance caps, upgrading with major realm breakthroughs. While important for elemental interactions and planting, they do not restrict learning heart methods or spells.
- Recruiting special disciples like Yaoji, Yu, Tushan Huahua, Quafu, and Hou Yi is tied to completing specific main and side quests. These characters often bring unique benefits or unlock further content.
Performance:
- A significant number of players reported that the game does not support 2K resolution. This technical limitation negatively impacts the visual experience for users with 2K monitors.
- Players noted a mechanic where monster strength scales with 'Tai Chu Yuan Nian' time. This dynamic difficulty increase impacts gameplay progression and strategy.
Recommendations:
- Many players feel the game is incomplete or unpolished, suggesting it's not ready for a full recommendation. They advise waiting for further development and bug fixes before purchasing or playing.
- There's a split in opinion regarding the game's current state for Early Access. Some recommend it for fans of specific genres (cultivation/simulation) who understand its early stage, while others advise caution.
- Some reviews appear to be part of a review-bombing effort, either to warn others or to support the developer. This skews the overall sentiment without providing specific, constructive feedback.
- Players see potential in the game despite its current flaws, comparing its development to a growing tree. They anticipate future improvements and believe it will become a good game with more work.
Miscellaneous:
- Players desire more depth and control over their disciples and sect members. This includes expanded roles for elders, independent disciple actions, unique disciple storylines, and better management tools like renaming and filtering options.
- The community acknowledges the game's potential but emphasizes that it is still in an early, unfinished state. Players are eagerly awaiting further updates, bug fixes, and content additions to reach its full potential.
- There's a strong demand for quality-of-life improvements related to inventory, crafting, and trading. Specific suggestions include better sorting, material quantity displays, bulk actions, and clearer UI for items.
- Players are looking for more engaging and customizable sect management experiences. This includes more decorative options, additional indoor scenes, and expanded gameplay loops like farming and exploration events.
- Players want more meaningful and diverse progression systems. This includes making experience points more impactful, balancing elemental combat styles, and refining attribute systems for better clarity and less randomness.
