It's fun but needs some quality of life changes.
Customers will ask for specific item types and the game just kinda expects you to memorize every item's traits. Would be great if it were better to play with a controller too because it feels like it was made for mouse & keyboard only and the controller compatibility was an afterthought.

This game is incredibly frustrating to play, from the controls to the weird camera views, down to the many annoying bugs and random crashes. Most of my three hour gameplay was trying to figure out how to stop the game from crashing and trying to get certain quests to work properly. Even after the latest patch (today) I am still having issues with being soft locked.

I give up for now.

Amber Isle had a lot of the right idea's and was trying to tap into a very unique currently unfilled niche with only one other game that has a similar style currently available. Where as their only partner in the niche of "cozy cartoon dinosaur games" went for a farming sim with dinosaurs Amber Isle attempts to emulate aspects of Nintendo's Animal Crossing series with a shop management sim at it's center where the player and all the NPC's ARE dinosaurs.

The very cozy stylized depictions of the environment and characters creates a very soft, warm, and indeed cozy feeling that invites the player to enjoy the jokes hidden in the name's of characters and items, unique dialog, and enjoyable ways the development team has taken our favorite prehistoric fauna and morphed them into sweet soft anthropomorphic cartoon characters to interact with. Sadly, this is where my problems with the game begin.

Before I get into the bugs with the game I have a long list of personal gripes with the game that may lessen the experience for people who share my mindset, starting with the characters.
The player character is highly customizable, allowing for a wide range of color and asset combinations giving the player a lot of self expressive freedom with enough limits to promote creativity. HOWEVER this comes at the cost that while the player can approximate a very very small number of species of dinosaur and prehistoric mammal once in the world alongside the NPC's and especially alongside NPC's that are a race you can attempt to recreate the player character feels grievously out of place with only, at the point of the game I've reached, two NPC's using the player character model one of whom seems only to use this model so they can reuse animations made for the player while doing their task of constructing other NPC's home's the player places for them (shortcuts like this are not uncommon, but when the entire rest of the cast is unique and well designed this becomes painfully obvious). This is not to mention the wide range of species that exist as NPC's that the player can't even ATTEMPT to approximate such as Dilophosaurus or any form of Sauropod and Pterosaur nor how the player cannot have the same attributes as NPC's of specific species like not being able to have the tail spikes AND back plates of a Stegosaurus on their tail at the same time. Needless to say this has been deeply upsetting for someone who loves these animals and the design of this game.

The attempt to emulate Nintendo's animal crossing came with one major flaw, while the game play loop is solid and decent it is dreadfully stagnant and repetitive with no variations or side activities to occupy the players time, I think fishing or bug catching wouldn't go amiss. Something for the player to choose to do to break up the monotony of running the shop and gathering resources.

The NPC characters really are fantastic and varied with fun personalities and are without question the highlight of the game being the main reason to come back but the process of befriending them is as simple as ask them to hang out then collect resources, you can max a characters friendship by clearing one area and because some area's have more resources than others you can use one area on multiple NPC's allowing three or four NPC's to be maxed out in one go if they are available on the map and once you've maxed out their friendship and completed all their personal quests you are never required to interact with them again and they don't seem to have enough unique dialog from day to day to encourage the talk function outside of initial befriending.

As a final note, there's a lot of model errors. Seams are very visible on the player character where the modular pieces attach a few NPC characters will have teeth poke out of their bottom lip when speaking mainly Adi and a few have holes in their models. From afar this is often unseen but during cutscenes when the camera gets close to the characters it becomes obvious.

Now for actual known issues that are far more wide spread.

I myself have yet to face any game breaking say for one but many players have faced issues that have prevented them from being able to continue playing the game requiring new saves entirely if they're lucky.

The main issue I wanna discuss is a issue regarding a quest line with the character that upgrades the players shovel tool. Currently there is a issue where the NPC rewards the player with the max upgrade to their shovel tool after completing the second quest chain, this upgrade allows the player to swiftly dig any dirt pile and highly increases the chance the player will find artifacts to be donated to the museum. Upon completing the characters third quest chain however the player is given a downgrade to the shovel tool with no way to switch to the upgraded tool means the player will has a far lesser chance of obtaining rare artifacts and takes significantly longer to dig up dirt mound resources, primarily the lesser chance to find artifacts means the player will heavily struggle to complete the museum and this is assuming some artifacts aren't locked from the player by not having the max shovel. I only highlight this issue because for one reason or another an issue like this was known by launch and was not made a priority to be included the 1.0.1 patch and comments made were met with a simple "we will continue to patch the game," this is HIGHLY concerning and while I do believe this statement the fact the patch is so worryingly small and introduced bugs that seem to increase the chance of save corruption soft locks the game failing to launch at all and more per reports by players has left me afraid to open the game at this point as I could be at risk of losing my progress as it currently stands.

With this in mind, a number of other issues, the fact a patch was almost seemingly rushed out the door five days after launch and introduced as many if not more issues than it has fixed a worry of mine, that the devs needed to let this game cook for longer and need to slow down heavily before pressing further and just in general seem to rush through development is given a worrying amount of backing. HOWEVER! THAT IS NOT TO SAY THE DEV TEAM ARE BAD AT THEIR JOB OR BAD PEOPLE! They clearly love this project and appear to be inclusive accepting and well meaning folk, they just need to slow down and priorities taking their time and covering issues more thoroughly before launching updates and as it stands for me I am probably going to wait a few updates before opening the game again. Please check the community hub for the status of the game before purchasing this game.

Amber Isle is fantastic in concept, and many personal gripes I have can be overlooked because of the things it gets so right. The developers behind it again appear to be lovely folk open and accepting and willing to hear our concerns and want to continue working on this game, but in it's current state I cannot recommend purchasing the game and ask you to please wait until a few more patches are released to fix some of the issues hurting this otherwise cozy, well stylized, well meaning game. I myself intend to attempt 100% completion once I feel the game is in a better state. and I look forward to the day I can change my review to a strictly positive one.