As Far As The Eye Review – by Shaun – The Geordie Hobbit

Written by Shaun, the Geordie Hobbit (@Shaun0Shire on twitter)

Hi, I’m the wind and welcome to As Far As The Eye. 

Well, I’m not actually the wind, but that is what you’ll be playing as in this lovely little city builder. Maybe city builder is a bit grand, but lovely little procedurally generated nomadic journey strategy sim…that doesn’t have the same ring to it. 

Gameplay

As Far As The Eye sees you take the role of the wind, as you help guide a group of nomads as they escape a flood and seek refuge at the Eye. On that journey, you’ll explore procedurally generated “halts” or areas where the nomadic caravan halts for resource gathering. As the wind, you gently guide pupils into mining, foraging and building. They’re a happy but very slow lot. They dally around with a large balloon tied to them, taking days to complete each task. Days are essentially how the game manages your turns. Each day you can assign a task to each pupil, or let them carry on with whatever they’re taking their sweet time over. This is where the strategy comes into play. Time isn’t on your side, you see, as there’s a massive tidal wave en-route and it’s going to destroy everything. This sees you managing your resources and your time. As the wave gets closer, you’re subjected to isolated disasters. Will the forest that you’re harvesting for wood suddenly burst into flame? Quite possibly!

The premise is simple, but effective. At its very core, this gameplay loop could be very rewarding. COULD be, which is where the problem lies.

First off, the controls. The game started off life on Steam, which is readily apparent. The game seems to be set up for a mouse and keyboard or a touch screen. The controls aren’t overly intuitive and I had quite a few instances where I was selecting the wrong pupil or pressing every button over and over to try and build a market. This is a console port, but in the most basic of senses, which is a shame.

Graphics and Audio

Moving away from the janky controls, the game is presented beautifully. The models have all been lovingly crafted and you can feel the creators love coming through. With the halts being procedurally generated, each hexagonal piece of landscape has a slightly generic feel, or repeated theme, but that’s to be expected from this type of game. There’s no point in making stone quarries look unique, if it’s not apparent what they are.

My main issue with the graphics is targeted towards the user interface. There’s no option to increase text size, which makes following things difficult from the couch. As a game that relies almost entirely on text, this seems like a massive oversight. Again, this seems to be a hangover from being built on PC. The general user interface is clearly the exact same as the PC version, which has had some button mapping for navigation. Sadly it can be confusing to keep track of what resources are what and how to even get to sections of the menu.

The audio is lovely though. Very relaxing, which is exactly what this genre needs. The one slight annoyance is the “whispering” that you make as the wind. Aetherial voices that whisper away as you give pupils commands. It fits with the theme, but can feel a little bit like the start of a horror movie.

In Conclusion

This really could be an enjoyable game, but not on console. Well, not in its current incarnation at least. A UI overhaul, maybe with a mouse cursor tied to an analogue stick, would make the world of difference. I’ve actually purchased on steam, as the core of the game really did feel like it could be great. That and some accessibility options for text scaling and I think this could be a great console game. As it stands, I found it really difficult to relax and enjoy fully, which is a real shame.

At £20.99 on the xbox marketplace, i’d recommend trying on Steam instead. 

Written by Shaun, the Geordie Hobbit (@Shaun0Shire on twitter)