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This open-world survival crafting game puts the early in early access

2K View2024-02-22

Nightingale

SurvivalCraftingOpen World

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SHOULD I PLAY NIGHTINGALE?

Hold off on this one until it’s had a few more updates. Nightingale is an open-world crafting survival game made by former BioWare devs. There are some terrific ideas behind it, but it still needs a lot of work. The visuals are unappealing, the servers are unreliable, and the gameplay needs a lot of refinement. Yes, it’s an early access game, but similar titles that released this year, like Palworld and Enshrouded, entered early access with a lot more polish. It has the potential to be great eventually, but right now, it’s not up to par with the competition.

TIME PLAYED

I’ve played six hours of Nightingale so far. I was hoping to get in a little more playtime, but the servers went down for maintenance near the end of my play session. Still, I had plenty of time to explore all three available biomes, build a few bases, and fight some creepy-looking monsters, including a few boss battles. I can see the game’s potential, but I got bored with it pretty quickly. If I wasn’t writing a review, I would have given up after an hour or two.

• Awesome realm-hopping mechanic. Instead of limiting you to a single world, Nightingale allows you to collect cards and use them to create worlds with specific qualities. Play a Desert Card, and you’ll spawn into a dry, sandy landscape. Use a forest card, and you can jump to a world filled with trees and other greenery. Biome cards can be combined with other cards that alter the realm in significant ways. One card allowed me to create smaller realms, while another ensured that the enemies dropped extra loot. It’s a fantastic idea for a survival game, and I think it’ll be a lot of fun to play around with once the game is further along.

• Bizarre, fascinating character creator. Nightingale’s character creator is filled with features I’ve never seen before. I was able to customize my character’s teeth, deciding how crooked and decayed I wanted them to be. I could select up to three different colors in each eye and add glitter to my character’s lips, giving them a subtle sparkle. I even had the option of designing my character’s parents and grandparents, creating an entire family tree. Nightingale’s characters aren’t the prettiest, but the character creator is a lot of fun to play around with.

WHAT NEEDS IMPROVEMENT IN NIGHTINGALE?

• Always online requirement. Nightingale requires you to be connected to its servers, even if you’re playing solo. During my play sessions, I had to deal with lag, disconnects, and downtime for server maintenance. That would be frustrating but forgivable if I was trying multiplayer, but I exclusively played single-player, which made the problems inexcusable. There’s absolutely no reason to require an internet connection in a game that advertises solo play. It’s all of the downsides of online gaming with none of the upsides, and that really sucks.

• The graphics are pretty rough. One of the things that drew me to Nightingale were the distinctive steampunk visuals showcased in its trailers. Unfortunately, the actual game isn’t that pretty. The low-quality textures and sloppy user interface make the game look dated. There’s a lot of pop-in, and the craftable items feel uninspired. There are hints of the cool aesthetic from the trailers, like some awesome monster designs, but overall, it’s not a great game to look at.

• It’s painfully slow. Everything in Nightingale feels sluggish and drawn out. I had to deal with long load times every time I jumped to a new realm, which made me want to stay put. Crafting and building is tedious and unintuitive. There’s no crafting from storage, which always drives me crazy. The menus are clunky, and it took too many steps to successfully make anything, even when I had all the necessary materials in my inventory. Survival games are usually pretty grindy, but the best games get around that by making crafting and gathering effortless. In contrast, Nightingale makes even the basic tasks feel like a chore.

• Combat is boring. Fighting monsters is a big part of Nightingale, and unfortunately, this part of the game is deeply dull. Some creatures have cool designs, but there’s no challenge or excitement to fights. Monsters run at you and swing, you swing back, and it keeps going until one of you is dead. Like most aspects of the game, fights feel drawn out, and there’s not really anything to them. It’s just another monotonous task in an extremely lackluster game.