Wonder how I will feel about this game after a few months…

Happy Birthdays – Nintendo Switch – Released: 6/5/18 – $39.99

Short Review (Review copy provided by NIS America)

Happy Birthdays is a time consuming game even with the amount of time I put into it, it doesn’t scratch the surface. Much like other Simulation game like Stardew Valley, Minecraft, SimCity, etc. you will need to dedicate a lot of time to get the full experience. I’m not going to sugarcoat it but I only have put in around 20 hours and wasn’t able to do a whole lot. Even though I enjoy my time with the game it does take a long time so being able to play this on the go is a great experience. I remember when it came out on PS4 and wanted to try it out but I would have easily gotten bored due to only being able to play at home. These type of games really help when you can turn them on, get into your area quickly, do a few things, save and repeat over a long period of time. To be honest I only had around two weeks to prepare for this review but I will likely update it in the summer after I have sunk in a few more dozens of hours. I would give Happy Birthdays a 7 out of 10! While the game is enjoyable it is a bit slow, there is a ton of tutorials before you get the hang of it but environments are great and the “library” is easy to navigate to the next evolution.

The icon is fairly basic as it uses mainly the promotional art:

Story

The story is fairly simple considering what the overall goal of the game is which is to create humans. You are what I believe is a child that stumbles on a book that takes him to this new world. He meets a “being” that controls everything in the cube but his power is currently not working. You are tasked with restoring the land and using his powers to create a new world. You only have a small section for the world in the form of a cube. That is about it to be honest you don’t get any more information unless you read about the monsters in the library.

Gameplay

Things are really complicated for this one just because of the sheer amount of things you can do. You will start the game and it will give you about an hour tutorial for the basic things you can do. After several tries doing certain things the game will hint you about stuff you could be doing such as evolving a certain monster. All terrain you can interact with and these do crazy amount of things such as temperature for the cube, what can evolve, and the amount of water to land ratio. This is where you will spend the bulk of your time due to trying to evolve certain animals to different things using the “Library”. The “Library” gives you the exact method to get to the next evolution including more information about the creation. This is something that will take a ton of time to get use to since you need to watch many things to get what you want. If you don’t pay attention you won’t notice stuff like population going down or notice the evolution path changed.

Personal Experience

Honestly for a good 5 hours I had no idea what I was doing and the tutorial was still showing me things from time to time. After about 10 hours is when I finally decided to buckle down and learn to do something since I wasn’t doing a whole lot before that. I was able to understand how the “Library” system works and get to a few new things but having trouble getting the right evolution paths.

Final Thoughts

At 20 hours this is a hard game to really judge since I haven’t scratched the surface. The library is nowhere near complete and I haven’t created humans. I feel like by chance many people could have but I wanted to see exactly how things worked. I feel by the middle to the end of summer I will re-evaluate my score and the review. Currently I will give the game a 7 out of 10 with the knowledge that the score will likely go up. The game is has so much content to experience and the tutorial will be a bit much for people. There are four worlds to explore and I spent 20 hours in just the basic “easy” on. I can’t wait to try out the other cubes to expand my library completion.

My Gameplay Footage:

Trailer:

End Credits

I really can’t wait to put more time into this. Producing new monsters and eventually getting to the humans is the goal but it seems like it will take a long time. For a while I had no idea what I was doing and I haven’t even touched the other locations. I feel as though this is a game I can easily sink hundreds of hours into much like I have with other Sim-based games. I really wish I had more time to experience this game but if I wanted until I was ready it would be 50+ hours into the game weeks or a month later. Hope you guys enjoy this review and look forward to when I regrade and add more to this review. I will be adding “Update” sections over time to further expand it but this is no where a full review as it would be tough to judge a game as massive as this in a short period of time.

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