Author: Darlinganddeath
Date: 05-18-2023
I want to start by saying, yes, I know the stigma that horse games have around them. Most people that see someone promoting or streaming a horse game immediately think that it's a genre fit only for a young crowd, but we horse game enthusiasts will spend an eternity arguing differently. That's not what this article is so don't fret my Pillow Fortian Friends, but I will say that the entire reason I play horse games is because I grew up riding horses.
Yes, at 18 years old I was an employed horse trainer and riding instructor for the brother of an Olympian horse rider. It was a High-Class Stable and my dream job as I'd been riding since the age of 6. Sadly, a few years ago I fractured my spine and as I'm a mother now, I don't ride often for fear of falling and paralyzing myself. So... horse games are the only way I get to relive some serious highlights in my life and while I may opt into owning a horse again in the future, it's not anytime in the immediate future so for now, I fill that void with horse games.
Hopefully, that put some perspective into why some of us choose to find enjoyment in this genre and you'll go into this review a bit more open-minded. I can say with confidence that The Ranch of Rivershine is a fun addition to this particular genre as we've put nearly 10 hours into it and have so much more to do. We've enjoyed every moment in it and whether you're a horse game enthusiast, or yes, looking for a game that would fit a younger audience as well, it's one you should highly consider.
Game Description:
Saddle up and build your own horse ranch! Raise foals, care for your horses, and train them as you explore the western wilderness! Participate in cross-country competitions and become your town's champion. Befriend the villagers who'll help you on your adventure at the Ranch of Rivershine!
Story:
Now, I'm going to start out by saying that the story is quite similar to every other horse game. The horse farm and the surrounding town have become run down due to nobody taking care of the ranch for a long while. It's of course entirely your job to improve and restore it. This is the theme of pretty much every farming game on the market nowadays with a few special twists to each game that keep them all different enough to be enjoyable.
For The Ranch of Rivershine, it's the magic of the horse statues that are scattered around the lands. I don't want to give too much away as the Story is one aspect of games I choose to be very general about in my reviews. The one thing I personally don't like spoiled when it comes to games is the story. Gameplay mechanics are usually announced in game trailers and the like, but the Story always remains a generalized overview. Anyways... After winning a few competitions in this game, some parts of the story came up that seem a bit "magical" and we'll just leave it at that. We honestly haven't gotten a deep look into it after 9 hours of game time so we're confident there's plenty of gameplay and story left to be uncovered.
Aside from the main story, you interact with a lot of fun, and surprisingly personable characters. Sometimes in this genre, NPCs feel like a sorry afterthought, just put there to give the game some life, but I adore the character art in this title. The slight animations they have when you speak with them lets each one's personality shine through just a bit more. It's a nice touch that really adds life to the characters.
Gameplay:
There are a few key aspects of The Ranch of Rivershine's gameplay that I want to highlight and focus on, so let's get started!
Horses & Care:
Just like most horse games, you can buy, sell, breed, ride, train, and care for your horses. The Ranch of Rivershine has opted into using, what is quickly becoming the genre standard, stat bars that help determine whether your horse will be fast and a good jumper, or slow, but able to run for miles. It's a standard I appreciate as it's a fantastic way to add character to the horses and doesn't take a whole bunch of extra fluff. They've also opted into simple horse animations that might not be hyper-accurate but they don't hurt my brain to look at the way some games do, so that's a win. In fact, the horses are quite cute and the animations are fluid so I can actually appreciate them even if they're on the simpler side.
Moving on to the care of your horses; each horse you own will need to be cared for daily. I want to take a moment to bow my head in appreciation of The Ranch of Rivershine for making their daily chores take no more than a few seconds per horse. I can feed my horses with the click of a button, clean the stall with a simple mouseover hover, brush them with a few mouse movements, and call it good. At 9 hours in I have 4 horses and am looking to upgrade my barn to accommodate more, so knowing that I'm not going to be spending half my in-game day cleaning my horses, is a huge relief. Horse game developers, it might seem cool to make realistic cleaning games, but if you're going to allow someone to have a dozen horses, please consider the long-term time cost this has and opt in for less as it's truly so much more sometimes.
You can also turn your horses out into the pasture to eliminate having to care for them the next day, but they will wake up with less energy than if they had stayed in their stall. The only time I find this to be a negative is if you're actively training or racing your horses to max out their potential. The reduced energy will affect how much you can train them in a day, and how much stamina they'll have in their races. I will say that the moment I have a horse maxed out with every unlocked race won on them, I let them happily enjoy their pasture days and train up my others in the meantime.
Controls:
I want to write a quick paragraph about the horse controls as I find them to be mostly easy and intuitive. The horses control and turn fairly well even if their agility stat is low, and the jumps are clearly laid out with a big green area encompassing the obstacles that tell you when you'll need to jump. I found it to be no trouble completing the races or just adventuring around the trails with my furry friends and definitely think a younger audience would be perfectly capable of doing the same.
The only thing I noticed is that if you're turning your horse and want to switch the direction you're turning (right from left or vice versa) sometimes the horse would lock up and stop turning entirely. I'm not sure if they implemented this to prevent clipping through objects due to weird or rapid turning animations, but in other titles I've played, the horses usually switch between the directions fluidly and easily, so maybe it's more of a bug than anything? Regardless, we experienced it, so I'm adding it here.
Training:
Speaking of training, let's talk about it! Your horses in this game are born, or bought, with a specific amount of potential that will decay with age and training. As the game explains, you want to prioritize certain stats depending on what you plan on using the horse for. I find if you want to win races, training a horse with high endurance and speed is key. A horse can get over the jumps and maneuver fairly well even with a lower jumping and agility skill, but you'll absolutely feel how slow they are or how much endurance they lack once you unlock a few of the higher-level races.
It's important to note that when you're buying a horse, don't just look for one with high potential. My best early game horses were those that had between 15-20 natural skills in each stat (agility, jumping, speed, and endurance), as well as over 55 potential to be spread across whatever I wanted them trained in. I found the beginner races easy to tackle with horses that met these requirements.
Something to once again note about the training is that your horse's potential does decay as you train them. Once their potential hits 0, their skills will freeze where they are. This isn't necessarily a bad thing as I found the second horse I bought from the auction could still easily tackle races I unlocked a bit further into the game. His speed and endurance carried us to victory with a few seconds to spare and I definitely hadn't run an optimal course, so, don't stress too much once your horse has maxed out, they're likely still viable for a few races to come.
Horse Sales & Breeding:
I want to directly continue this from the Training section as once your horse has hit its max and is not able to keep up in the races anymore, it might be a good idea to consider either breeding them or selling them. If you opt into breeding, it's a good idea to find a mare and stallion with decent base skills, max out their skills, then hope their baby will have better base skills than them. This is a great way to continue on a bloodline and strengthen it over time. I always love this feature because it allows this sense of connection to your new horses. Rather than just going and buying the next best horse from the auction yard, you'll take some pride in knowing that your horse is a 10th-generation champion from a long line of them. It's a seemingly silly thought that actually gives you a sense of connection to your little in-game creatures and one I adore.
If you decide to go with the route of selling them instead, just know that this is equally a smart move. You can always find a horse with similar base stats and train it up again to breed in the future should you want, but buying horses from the auction, maxing them out, and selling them for about 3 times what you bought them for has been my main source of income in the game. In real life, I'm not a huge fan of this concept for obvious reasons, but in a game based on buying, training, breeding, and selling horses, it's one I can at least appreciate due to how much replayability it adds to the game. Let's be honest, we all love playing farming games and petting our digital pets every day hoping their little heart levels will go up so that we can sell their milk or fur for more money at the trader. The Ranch of Rivershine is simply following that trend but with the horses.
Farming:
Multiple horse games lately have been baking a bit of farming into them, and Ranch of Rivershine is no different. From a logistics standpoint, it just makes sense. It's highly unusual to come across a gigantic horse ranch that isn't growing at least a little home garden of carrots for their horses. So, when I got introduced to the little farm plots I sighed with content and happily planted tons of oats and carrots for my horsey pals to enjoy.
The perk to farming in this game is that not only can you use the items for your own horses to replenish a bit of energy each day, but you can also use different grains to increase the speed at which your horses gain skills. The skill that increases depends on which grain you feed them. This is fantastic for someone like me who's currently training 3 horses at a time in order to sell them and buy some farm upgrades. It's a noticeable increase too, not just that "slight" upgrade that makes you wonder if it's a trick the local shopkeeper is playing on you in order to get you to buy all 500 of the carrots they have in stock. Of course, you can only use one energy treat and one grain a day, but let's be honest, in real life if you fed your horse 500 carrots to replenish their energy they'd probably be so sick they refused to eat another carrot the rest of their lives. For that reason, I can appreciate the realism this creates.
You can also sell your crops for a significant amount at the shops so if nothing else, it's a bit of extra coin in your pockets.
Exploration & Map:
This is pretty consistent with every horse title from recent years, but The Ranch of Rivershine offers some fantastic exploration features. There are quite a few different trails that you'll unlock after completing certain quests and fulfilling certain requirements. These new trails will usually have new collectibles to find such as grains, hays, and treats for your horses. I did notice that with every new trail I explored, the quality of the items I found increased. For example, on our first trail we only found one type of hay that restored only 25% of our horse's satiety levels (how hungry they are), whereas by the 3rd trail we unlocked, we were collecting oats that restored 75% of their satiety and hay that restored 50%.
This feature I actually grew to love the most. I was worried about buying more horses because of how expensive some of the shop items were in relation to the money I passively made on a daily basis that didn't include selling one of my horses, but I quickly realized I could just run around and collect enough straw to clean their stalls and oats/hay to keep them fed with no need to visit a shop at all. In fact, I was collecting enough to sell. It's also not inconvenient to go collect the items either considering your horse will gain training levels just by riding them around.
I also want to compliment this game's guide system. Not only does it allow you to track quests and help guide you to your next objective, but you can also click on stores and people and hit "start guide" in the map menu to be guided there. This is just so nice because I hate opening up maps and menus often, it breaks the immersion of the game every time you do it, so the guide features make traveling around a lot more painless and fun.
Note for Improvement: I do wish that you could collect items while on your horse. I understand how unrealistic this is in real life, however, in a game, the amount of dismounting and re-mounting you do gets ridiculous. In real life, if I have to get off my horse and back on more than 4-5 times, my legs would be dead. Not to mention the fact that we're straight-up ground mounting our horse in this game. For those that don't know, ground mounting means to climb onto the horse's back from the ground, with no help of stairs or a stationary object to give you height. It can be highly strenuous on your legs depending on how tall your horse is. For a short Arabian or smaller Quarter Horse, this might be an easy task, but if you're sporting you're 17.2 hands Thoroughbred, good fricken luck!
Competitions:
I mentioned the Races in the game a bit earlier, but let's go a bit more into detail. You'll start off by unlocking the first race just a day or two into the game and a new one will unlock with each trail you open up. These all start at the beginner difficulty which I found to be no task at all to compete and win. I will say that my starting horse I hadn't trained hard enough in Endurance and he did end up struggling by the 3rd race we'd unlocked, but the second horse we bought and trained is happily tackling even the 4th race, so it's worth noting that you shouldn't be too worried about these increasing in difficulty to an extreme extent. I haven't hit intermediate competitions yet even after 9 hours so I'm hyper-curious to know what this will do to the difficulty level, but alas that will have to wait.
It's likely that I'll update this article as soon as I have experienced it, and I'll post about that when I do, but for now, the beginner races offer a fun experience that changes with each area you're racing in and I do adore it. The best feature about the races is that you can do them multiple times in a day with different horses and the first time you win each race in a day, you'll get a bonus to the prize money. I found it quite lucrative to take 3-4 of my horses and win quite literally every race, every day. It padded my coins and made me feel less inclined to sell my horses, which, I greatly preferred. The idea of my lesser stat horses earning their keep by winning 1,250 coins in the beginner races every day is far better than, "sorry, you're maxed out and Sprout over there is just better, so, you gotta go". I've never been the type that agreed with selling horses once their "use" has run out so thank you to The Ranch of Rivershine for providing something for our less talented pals to do that contributes.
One last quick note about the competitions... I adore that all of them can be accessed by the board in town. I actually hate running around to individual courses and much prefer having them all held in the same spot. Even if they're "technically" in different places, having them all accessible from the same spot makes the game so much nicer you don't even know.
Tip for Improvement: I actually only have one note to add here. During the competitions, I can't say that I got lost, because they have a handy little arrow pointing you in the direction you need to go, but the jumps often got lost in the green terrain or landscape of the area you're racing in. In real competitions, you'd have flags marking each jump to make them more visible to the competitors. I'd implore the devs to implement this feature as I nearly ran past a few of the jumps on my first runs through the competitions due to them blending in with their background.
Fast Travel:
A big feature of this game is the fast travel and it ties both the exploration and competitions together quite well. I've definitely had complaints about previous horse titles due to the sheer amount of time you waste trying to get to the different points around the map. Thankfully, in this one, you can simply teleport to the entrance of each trail or zone by using the travel function that can be found in the map menu. Now, this only takes you to the entrance of the zone, it will not take you to the entrance of other trails in that same area, or points in town, but I still find myself using this feature a lot as once you're at the far side of a trail, happily picking oats, you don't always feel like running the entire way back. Thankfully, in the Ranch of Rivershine, you don't have to.
Tip for Improvement: It would be cool to allow fast travel to the entrance of any trail in the zones. For example, when you visit the town there are multiple trails you can travel to, but you can't fast travel to those entrances, only to the entrance that's right next to the trail leading to your farm. It is actually a bit misleading as you can click on trail entrances and hit travel, but it took me a few times of hitting "fast travel" on the entrances to certain trails before realizing that it would only ever teleport me to the same entrance of the zone every time.
Farm & World Upgrades:
This is a big feature in a lot of games nowadays and one I particularly enjoy. By progressing through the story, completing quests, and paying for Ranch upgrades, you get this sense that you're building up something and gaining progress in the game. It keeps you entertained and excited about what the next upgrade will be.
The upgrades in The Ranch of Rivershine are no different, ranging from barn upgrades, pasture upgrades, and arena upgrades, to unlocking new trails and zones that will lead to more races to compete in. Each zone also unlocks a new character in the game that added a fun new element each time. For example, in the first zone I unlocked I met a girl who was all about farming and taught me how to plant stuff on my farm. The second one had a gentleman teaching me all about the very upgrades we're talking about right now.
It's actually an incredibly fun way to introduce new aspects of the game into your experience without overloading you. Sometimes when games start out with all the NPCs readily available for awkward conversation right from the get-go, I get a sense of anxiety and hopelessness, knowing there isn't any way I'm going to befriend even half of them. Games that break us in slowly to their features actually make us appreciate them more, not to mention it gives purpose to each NPC that they wouldn't otherwise have, or... that I would've ignored due to having to meet all of them in the same day and forgetting what half of them even do around the town.
I'm excited to see what lies in store for us as there's still quite a bit we haven't unlocked upgrades wise so expect that to be included in future updates to this article as well.
Audio & Visuals:
We'll keep this section short and sweet since this isn't exactly the newest Assasins Creed game with hyper-realistic graphics. I will say though that the world is well-textured with plenty of foliage and trees to give it life and make it feel like a true ranch out in the wilderness. It's pretty visually and has a great soundtrack that didn't earn a mute from me. It made for great background noise while I happily galloped through the lush fields.
The audio is great for the most part, but I will note that there are a few spots where you run your horse close to the water when you're not actually in the water, that your horse makes splashing sounds even though you're in the dirt. This could easily be fixed I'm sure but it's also incredibly minor. I will add that while the sounds of the horse running don't always match the horse's stride, ultimately, unless you're looking for it, you won't notice it. All-in-all, visually and auditorily, it's a balanced game!
Bugs:
There is only one bug I experienced in the game and it actually made me laugh a decent bit. I was purely curious if you could ride your horses into the store... and... you absolutely can. In fact, you can ride them pretty much anywhere. Besides them obviously getting awkwardly caught on a few items in the buildings, if you enter into a conversation with an NPC while you're actively walking your horse forward, you'll keep walking forward until the horse hits a wall and then you'll spend the entire cutscene and/or interaction with that NPC, staring at said wall. It didn't affect our game negatively in any way as after having a good laugh we opted for leaving our horse ground tied outside, but regardless, it was fun to experience and laugh about.
Conclusion:
Yes, I recommend the game. Why? It may be a silly horse game to some but it's just as enjoyable as half the farming simulators I've played lately and offers a great amount of content for what you spend on it. I can imagine that there's at least 25-40 hours of main content, depending on how fast you blow through it, or if you choose to go for a more slow-paced experience the way I often do, you might look forward to more. So, if you're a horse lover or know someone in the younger audience that loves the genre, I encourage you to consider picking up The Ranch of Rivershine. If you're hesitant, feel free to snag it if and when it goes on a Steam sale, but remember, good games cost money to create, and supporting the developers by paying full price is how we allow them to keep coming out with updates and/or future content for the games we know and love.
I'll definitely be continuing my journey around the Ranch and updating this article with more information in the future, so you can look forward to that.
We'd love to answer any questions you may have and please feel free to leave your own thoughts about the game below. We'll respond promptly and thoroughly!
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Disclaimer:
Please note that we did receive this product for free, but we have not been paid or promoted for this review, and are not affiliated with The Ranch of Rivershine or its developers officially in any way. All thoughts are based on our own genuine experience of the game. All footage is based on the Game in its current state as of 05/18/2023 and is subject to change or be completely omitted in future patches at the developer's discretion.
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