Robert

2★ out of 5 at best.

Tales of the Shire. Sounds like a nice peaceful game of being a hobbit. Well it is bearly that. The game is about moving to a country village, having almost no money. Being inundated with neighbors who want to mooch meals off of you. The cooking system is actually not bad. Too bad that it is the only real thing you can do in this game. Besides fishing. Oh you can forage for ingredients for the meals or go fishing for your meals.

You can't even sit in the fancy furniture you can buy. You have to plop on the floor and look at your sofa or easy chair. Thinking wouldn't it be grand to sit on that comfy thing that does nothing more than take up space.

Oh, even though your hobbit has their own house, you have a curfew. Stay out past bed time and you will be forcably poofed to your house, next to your bed. Yes, you don't even have the luxury of getting out of bed. Why should there be a curfew in a game? Time passes by very quickly. In less than 30 minutes a day is gone. It is very annoying to be shunted home, just because, when you are trying to explore.

But its such a pretty game. Well, it is in the commercials. They have raised the quality to Max. The default is for performance and low quality. So out of the box its not so good. You can ramp it up, but my experience was the quality is not as good as the ads.

There are some quests to do that are your basic fetch quests but mainly you are the village cook and the village is very happy to mooch off of you. There is a very limited gardening portion to the game.

There is not much to do in this game. You can't even repair your own home. It has doors and rooms that are boarded up. You must feed the local tinker and get their friendship level up to get anything done.

There is no crafting other than cooking. There are no real puzzles or quests. You can't even interact with people outside of the fetch quests. Other than feeding the moochers. Oh you will get rewards for feeding them.