Welcome to the review of My Time at Portia, a new building simulator where you need to build, build, build to become the number 1!
Restore your Pa’s neglected workshop to its former glory by fulfilling commissions, growing crops, raising animals, and befriending the quirky inhabitants of this charming post-apocalyptic land!
Armed with your Pa’s old handbook and workbench, you must gather, mine and craft your way to being crowned the number one workshop in Portia. Help the locals rebuild the town and uncover the secrets locked deep away beneath it. Be prepared though…it won’t be easy!
The town of Portia is full of friendly new faces for you to meet. Make friends, complete requests, exchange gifts, go on dates and let romance blossom!
I played My Time at Portia on Xbox One and what surprised me most of all, is how huge this game is! At around 2 hours into the game, I had the impression I was still not even close to completing a single percent of the game and I was right!
It starts with your arrival in Portia, where you will take over the workshop from your Pa. The house you will live in, a run-down shack, is part of your initial habitat but it is also very much in need of repairs. You will be fixing her up in no time though, but the story will immediately force you to fix the flooring. The draft is causing you to lose sleep, such attention to detail is incredible really.
The main storyline consists mostly of getting commissions done, gathering materials and staying alive at first. As we all know, I avoid spoiling storylines so I will limit myself purposely to the initial few things to do. We start off by getting a license to become a builder! You get some basic tasks and it is more or less a “figure things out for yourself” show at first. You get to find out how to do things mostly on your own.
Once you pass through a few of the initial tasks, one thing you are asked is to build a bridge. At that point, first you need to figure out how to craft the items needed to build the pieces of the bridge. The next step is to find wood to fuel the furnace. All incredible attention to detail but also cumbersome that you need to do a lot of groundwork at times just to get a piece of copper plate in your hands.
As I also reviewed and finished Dragon Quest Builders, the similarities are real, I do need to make a clarification before continuing. DQB is more RPG based and My Time at Portia is more real life, more detailed and just overall much more realistic. Building is easier in DQB though. If you are looking for a lighter tasked game, go for DQB, otherwise, do consider My Time at Portia!
As I already mentioned, the attention to detail is very hardcore and I want to give some more details about this. You get an actual time system that you need to adhere to, every time you go to sleep, you see where in the game you are, whether this be year 1 day 3 of month 2 or much further down the line.
There is also a monetary system in place! You get to earn money and use it to buy certain items. You need to pay to get access to certain ruins where you can harvest items “en masse” and depending on the ruins of choice, they are free of enemies or not. I laughed out loud the first time I entered the ruin in town and they asked me for an admission fee! The access is even limited in time, how cool is that?
My Time at Portia offers such a great variety of tasks that it will not bore you anytime soon if you are into these types of games! For my personal liking, the game felt a little too hands off and the entire part how I explained you got to figure things out on your own, it was a bummer at times. The time system, however, makes things so accurate. One time, I put some copper in the furnace, added fuel and went to sleep. After waking up, my crafts were finished and I just had to collect, select my next crafts and go gather more items.
In conclusion, My Time at Portia offers so much more than everything I described, it is like a real-life crafting/building simulator. Obviously, you will be spending tens of hours in this game so be sure to free up your schedule prior to buying the game! Even though I loved the DQB game more because of its RPG elements, I will be going back to Portia to explore more of this game in due time and see if I can make even more friends!
