April Grove Review
April Grove is a dud from a studio with an otherwise excellent body of work.
April Grove. Colorgrave
April Grove is a cozy life simulator developed by Colorgrave. It offers a relaxing experience that ultimately becomes tedious in its simplicity. Chop wood, collect resources, and upgrade gear. It started out charming, but that charm wore thin and couldn’t carry the game to keep me invested.
April Grove. Colorgrave
You arrive in a forest to take over as the new forester. A fairy named April has enchanted the forest so that there’s an endless supply of wood, and your job is to chop down those trees and harvest the logs. There are various residents in the small town neighboring the forest, but they just feel like window dressing for the tedium of the experience, since there isn’t much of a story to speak of.
April Grove’s loop is simple: chop trees, sell logs, level up to chop tougher trees. There isn’t much more it. Earning money to buy better axes isn’t motivating enough. The least the devs could have done is not make you buy an upgrade in order to run. In truth, this simplicity is advertised in the game’s Steam description, but I expected a little more, considering the excellence of Colorgrave’s other work.
April Grove. Colorgrave
The only place where the game shines is with its graphics. The perfectly executed, colorful pixel art is reminiscent of the Game Boy Color. The character sprites and portraits have lots of personality, which made me wish there was more to the story.
In the end, there's too little to do. Nothing meaningful happens to make the game more interesting, and its short length is already too long. You chop, you sell, you level. Tediously. I expected better from Colorgrave.
April Grove is available now on Steam.
Overall Score: 4/10
Played on: Steam Deck
