Pine switch release: Pine for Nintendo Switch — Nintendo Official Site

Pine for Switch Reviews — Metacritic

Switch Version 2.01.

Pine is addicting. The world of Pine is beautiful with varied biomes, plenty of items for crafting, and secrets to findSwitch Version 2.01.

Pine is addicting. The world of Pine is beautiful with varied biomes, plenty of items for crafting, and secrets to find everywhere. It is quite impressive that this 6 person team was capable of creating such a lived in world despite working with a limited engine.
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Story

The main plot of the game is that you are a human that is part of a village on top of a small mountain that is slowly falling apart. The village elders refuse to leave, believing the outside world is too dangerous for them. With a tragic event unfolding, you takes the matter into your own hands and proceeds to leave the village and look for a new home for the people to live. A solid premise that gives the player drive.

You then must go to any of the animal races and ask for help. They will be hesitant to do so, as they have their own villages to take care of. They will only help you as long as you help them. Thus the game is essentially you donating, trading, or teaming up with various factions to find your people a land of their own.

This leads to you trying to learn the history of the island, and how ancient humans must have survived in order to save humanity. It is enough to keep me invested, and makes the in game lore intriguing in its own right.

Overall its compelling in the way classic adventure games have been, making me give it an 8/10
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Gameplay

The core gameplay loop is pretty much that of a living breathing world. Each race has its own desires and needs, and will send out traders, gatherers, and warriors to ensure they can expand their control of the island to the best of their ability. This makes the world quite dynamic, as you will see different races interacting with each other in the fields and terrain outside of villages. You will also find them taking over different settlements throughout the game.

You will have to work with multiple factions to help your own people. I have noticed many people criticizing this system in that you cannot stick with a single faction, and must constantly switch who you are allied with. I personally think this was a logical choice, on the dev’s part, as it encourages you to learn each race’s perspective in the world and do more than the generic grind of leveling up a single village until you finish the game.

I would have definitely liked if there was more variations in NPC dialogue however. It would have been nice to see more side quests that provide materials or perhaps even some added lore. Outside from a few island stories I have played through, you will mostly be playing through multiple main story quests that you can do in any order you wish.

Outside of that however, you will also go through 3 Zelda like dungeons called «Vaults» and solve puzzles in the overworld. These dungeons have been mixed, with the first time you entering a vault not really explaining what to do. Once you figure out the first puzzle though, the remainder of the dungeon become solid challenges.

Combat can be improved, but is still good enough.

Just fix the crashing. 7/10.

8/10 with fixes.
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Visuals

The graphical art style of this game is beautiful, and very reminiscent of Fable. Sunsets, and shadows from the moonlight give the world a serene look. Character designs amongst the factions is also well done, with plenty of detail. 9/10
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Sound

I cannot stress just how amazing the soundtrack of Pine is. It is a perfect 10 in my book, and deserves the utmost praise. Sound effects are also surprisingly high quality. 10/10

Replay Ability
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The world is interesting to experiment with, but aside from that the world could have a few more side quests. 7/10
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Verdict
Overall Pine is fantastic despite some flaws in the code. 8/10… Expand

Pine | Pine on Nintendo Switch

24-09-2020 Posted in Project
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Dear players,

We kept you waiting, but we finally launched a huge patch for Switch — and we called it version 2.0!

Additionally, we partnered up with the fantastic Kakehashi Games to bring Pine to Nintendo Switch in Japan!

We are proud to have worked tirelessly on revamping the entire port to align it more accurately with the PC version. While the original port was done as best as possible under the circumstances around release, we wanted to take a good look at how far we could come after upgrading the engine and re-aligning the Switch version with the state PC was in at that point.

For months weve battled with the Switchs limited capabilities and built version 2.0 from the ground up. Below is a long list of all the things that were fixed, changed and added! Some of the highlights:

• Big performance stability gains and reduction in stutters because of incremental garbage collection, through upgrading Pines engine
• Massive memory optimizations — the game does not feature any (known) crashes through playtime anymore
• Loading times reduced by ~55%, much faster loading between scenes (interiors and open world)
• Increased world density to be on par with the PC version (in other words, lots of trees/bushes/rocks/assets added everywhere!)
• Smoother and much more responsive combat: added dodge cancel, kick out of any move and fractional directional control
• New languages: Dutch, Korean and Japanese