Great, but flawed – Don't Starve: Pocket Edition Review

I’ve followed Don’t Starve since the beta, and the Pocket Edition is a surprisingly good port. However, no new system is without its kinks. Within a week of playing I stumbled across some very annoying bugs that either caused me to lose a lot of progress (which when you’re like me and impatiently roving along for your favorite character, it gets really tedious really fast). Two of the most common bugs for me were if I tried interacting with menus too much, sometimes it would completely lock me out and I wouldn’t be able to interact with anything, UI and ingame. This happened several times in the ruins where I’d desperately stop to heal only to be locked out and mauled by Nightmare Splumonkeys due to rookie mistakes (me being a sissy kept me away from the ruins in the past.) Another quite annoying bug I’ve come across is that if I receive a call while in the game, it immediately crashes after a few seconds. Two bugs is not all that bad and it only took me a good few days to stumble across them which is equally not as terrible. However, it’s not just bugs that make the game difficult. It’s the controls, which can really only be faulted by the platform, not the game. Precise targeting and movement is a tedious task, especially kiting and targeting certain mobs. Eating, cooking, and planting takes three times as long as it normally would (though the cooking part is made a little easier since you can simply tap the item in your inventory when close to a certain object to interact with them), and combat with more than one mob becomes a death trap. For example, trying to get involved with a Hound on Beefalo battle. Without paying EXTREMELY close attention, you can easily get locked into swatting the beefalo on accident and having two armies gore you into proverbial Swiss cheese. Although the game has some cons to it, it still is not a bad game. Having gone to college has cut me off from PC gaming and Don’t Starve. But the pocket edition at least allows me to relive some old nostalgia. The art style is amazing, the mechanics are splendid, and the lore is out of this world. The world will tell you a story if you pay attention to it, such as the set pieces. You can find a skeleton with a spear surrounded by hounds teeth by a herd of beefalo and from that you can infer so much. Was he a rancher? An unfortunate hunter? And the world below the surface tells an even bigger story. What happened to the civilization deep below the ground, and where are they now? Only by replaying the game and scouring every detail with every character can fill in some of the blanks and the rest is left to your imagination. That’s what makes a game great is when it lays out the pieces and you must fill in the rest. tl;dr Mobile port has some really not fun bugs, but the game is still super good. Worth every penny.
Review by Aria Angel on Don't Starve: Pocket Edition.