Creatures of Sonaria

Creatures of Sonaria is a game made by Sonar Studios, a survival and roleplaying game made in 2020 where you can collect, trade, fight and play as different creatures with other players. It is currently in its Alpha stage.

Why It Sucks

 * 1) The game is very laggy and takes up a lot of resources. Because of this, mobile players can have a hard time loading in, and even PC players as well. It sometimes causes devices to crash, kicks the user out of Roblox, and causes their screen to freeze. Getting disconnected can happen pretty often, and the lag can cause problems when fighting, such as not being able to react in time and attack animations being delayed. There was a map recode coming, which would get rid of lag and other bugs, but it was scrapped due to personal reasons.
 * 2) Some creature abilities haven't been fixed yet, such as the Cottol's area poison, even after weeks or months of them being broken. Some creatures also have issues with their models that still haven't been fixed as well. There are a lot of bugs that aren't fixed in game, creature model and game wise. Older creatures are constantly neglected in favor of newer ones.
 * 3) The random Gacha was removed in 2021 and split up into a few other Gacha's, each one costing more than the rest. This makes the game a grindfest for new players and even experienced players in general if they want to get new creatures from the Gacha's, with an example of this being the session Gacha, where you have to kill 3 players, grow a creature, survive a weather event, eat 100 food and drink 100 water. New creatures are constantly added to the session gacha, so getting new creatures is a pain as you might have to reroll over and over until you get the new species.
 * 4) The private servers used to cost 100 robux, but now they cost 500. Having a private server for a year means that you'll have to pay a staggering 6,000 robux, which is 75.00 U.S dollars in robux. While they are optional, this proves that the game finds other ways to milk the player's money.
 * 5) The dev creatures are a quick cash grab, as their species costs robux, so you'll have to buy them in order to finish your entire collection. This also means that a new player can buy them and get an overpowered creature at the beginning of the game. There's the robux gacha which costs 150 robux to spin, and even then you can get duplicates or not get a creature you want, which might force players to spin again and spend their robux on it further. That's borderline gambling.
 * 6) The game forces players to be on the game for a long period of time, with some examples being that you get 5 mushrooms per 2 minutes in game. The two occasional weather events with minigames barely make up for this as well, since that they can start to get boring quickly, and even then they give little to no mushrooms. The other weather events don't do much besides hinder or disable certain things. There's also the time Gacha, and in order to get the Hellion Warden, you need to play for 250 hours. Which would mean you would have to play for around ten 24 hour days, or around 65 - 125 days if you play for 2 - 4 hours per day.
 * 7) Some creatures are ridiculously overpowered. The breath plushies, added in the Halloween event in 2021, break the combat system even further. A already overpowered creature can equip one and start to kill everyone. You can sometimes get one shotted without having a chance to fight back, and the creatures beginners are given don't have much of a chance against bigger ones sometimes.
 * 8) There isn't much to do post-game after you've finished your collection. You can talk to other players and explore the map but that's about it. It doesn't help that completing your creature collection can take a while as well, since that there are 283 creatures in total, counting the ones that aren't in game or were scrapped, and new creatures are constantly being cranked out and most of the time tend to be hard to get due to the hype surrounding them when they first drop. Creatures are sometimes scrapped for no reason at all.
 * 9) The herb plants look like brightly colored eyesores and are out of place, as it doesn't match the game's art style. They constantly move around the map which makes it a pain for herbivores to obtain them, and both baby and adult herbivores can starve to death if they don't find them in time. When the plants spawn at the volcano, they're nearly impossible to get since they spawn inside, meaning that big herbivore creatures might starve to death since the entrance is small. What's even odder, is that they added meat spawners for carnivores which don't move around the map, which removes the challenge of hunting as a carnivore.  There's pretty much barely any aspect of survival in this game, and it just seems like a roleplaying game rather than both a survival and roleplaying game. Even before the game started tumbling downhill, it lacked the survival aspect. The death rewards don't give much either, they give about 50 mushrooms at most which isn't a lot.
 * 10) The map is tiny and can be explored around easily by using a flier within a few minutes, which doesn't allow players to be spread out enough for the survival aspect of the game to work.
 * 11) There's no NPCs on land, only underwater. Even then, the underwater NPCs don't have any animations that work. So, they either stay in place, drift away from you into walls, or drift to you and stay in the middle of your creature, dealing damage. They sometimes get onto land as well, and even float off of the map.
 * 12) You need to sell off 25 species to get one tikit. Revive tokens to bring back a dead creature cost 5 tikits, which means you would have to sell off 125 species in order to get a revive token. Even then, you only get them with your login streak on the last day, which is about two weeks.
 * 13) There's only 4 soundtracks in total. The two soundtracks that play normally sound like stock music, and start to get repetitive.
 * 14) The attack animations for creatures are dull, as they compose primarily of swipes, bites and headbutts. The only creature with unique attack animations is the lmakosaurudon, and aggro animations are recycled for other creatures as well, along with calls which might just be another creature's calls but pitched down or just the same in general. A example of a lazy attack animation is the celeritas, which just consists of it opening and closing its mouth, not even moving it's neck or head.
 * 15) The new creature shop is overpriced, and there aren't any other ways to get mush besides the death rewards, AFK farming/playing the game in general, trading, or the volcanic eruption, which even then don't give a lot, and the trading economy is unfair to new players as everything is expensive in general. They moved the creatures that could be obtained from cheaper gachas to the creature shop, just making them harder to get for beginner players and harder to get in general. Like stated earlier, there isn't any form of difficulty added besides grinding more which can get start to get tiring and boring, doing the same things over and over again until you get enough which can take days. The stored creature shop is overpriced as well, as you can get stored creatures for more cheaper from other people than the shop itself.
 * 16) The LSS event made it even more harder for new players to get the new creatures in the event, and relied on a FOMO (Fear of missing out) tactic as the creatures in it were not coming back, including the novus warden which isn't tradable, meaning that if you joined after the event you wouldn't be able to get it. It originally was going to be free, but it was then changed to lock the creatures behind a paywall of 35,000 mushrooms, which is about roughly 9.5 days of grinding nonstop if you're a new player.

Redeeming Qualities

 * 1) The creatures have nice color schemes, and have smooth animations (walking, running, etc). Their models and designs look pretty good despite their flaws, and you can even buy other color palettes to mix and match colors as of September 2021. Some creatures have unique aggro animations and cower animations, such as the celeritas, minawii, and the murlk. Some creatures also have secondary palettes as well which can be unlocked by finishing a certain mission.
 * 2) The lore is kind of interesting.
 * 3) Some issues in the current game are being fixed and solved, although they take a while to fix them.
 * 4) You get mushrooms when logging in each day and sometimes tokens, and you also get 10 extra mushrooms for being a part of the group. You can even get a token for a free gacha spin, which can give you a new species for free and can help beginners and experienced players in general. The time gacha also allows beginner players to get pretty good creatures for playing the game, and the creatures you get from the gachas normally are pretty good stat wise, like the gramoss.
 * 5) The redwoods and volcano got a complete remake, which made them more realistic and gave them a nice touch. The inside of the volcano looks nice, and the tundra was expanded a bit. The game icon art looks nice, along with the art on the game's images.
 * 6) The mushroom to tikit converter makes it somewhat easier to get tikits.

Trivia

 * 39% of the creatures aren't in the game yet.