the strangest interaction has to be
sparring. Pretty much every man,
woman and child in Portia will willingly
and instantly engage in a button-
mashing bout of unarmed combat. It’s
pointless, and you can force a draw
with anyone by running around in a
circle for a minute, but it can be fun to
regularly beat the tar out of weaklings
you don’t particularly like. Perhaps you
could use the sparring to gain some
experience before venturing out to
fight monsters in dungeons, but the
combat isn’t exactly deep and more
important than possessing any skill is
having a sufficiently high level and a
decent weapon.
There are RPG elements, with a
skill tree where you can put your XP
into three branches, benefiting your
fighting, crafting or social abilities. In
addition, your home can be upgraded
considerably, adding more land and
useful features, such as a factory for
producing more materials and a stable
where you can keep a horse (or llama)
for getting around the large map a bit
faster. Although there’s not much of
an overarching plot beyond improving
the town and becoming the top dog
among craftsmen, it does have an
ending. Getting there is not hard but
you’re looking at well over 70 hours,
depending on how many side-quests
you take on.
The game would certainly benefit
from a longer day-night cycle and
greatly reduced crafting times,
because as things stand it can be a
bit of a grind. Mining for a particular
resource is slow, waiting for the
machines to do their thing is slower
still, and even scouring the town to
find the person you’re meant to hand
in your completed item to can take a
while. Contrary to gaming convention,
the on-screen map always points
north and doesn’t rotate, which we
found quite unhelpful. There are also
plentiful glitches such as floating
characters, vanishing characters,
endlessly repeating sound effects andsuchlike, making it feel very much like
a work in progress.
While its individual parts aren’t
outstanding, and some of the
mini-games are not worth revisiting,
we have a strange attraction to My
Time At Portia. The urge to spend just
one more day to see if you can finally
build that damned gizmo is not to be
underestimated, and one day swiftly
rolls into another until you’ve got so
thoroughly entangled in a bunch of
projects, it almost feels like a waste of
effort to let it all go. QLOVE
ACTUALLY
You can choose to
romance anyone of
marrying age, but love
can’t be rushed. It
takes a while to raise
your friendship level
to the point where
you can offer a Heart
Knot, making them
your boy/girlfriend,
and after that there’s
work to be done
before you can get
married. Once you’re
hitched, you’ll have
an extra pair of hands
to help out in the
workshop, and you
might get a discount
at wherever they
work. When you get
bored, for 50 grand
you can give them a
Broken Mirror,
signalling your
immediate divorce.“We ended up
sleeping through
several days
just to hurry the
thing along”
ABOVE Venture
into a dungeon
without a decent
weapon and you
can expect to
take a beating.
LEFT Everyone
turns out in
numbers for the
many festivals
and town
gatherings.OXM VERDICT
A sprawling
ramshackle
mishmash of a
game that
somehow works.7
FAR LEFT You
can’t customise
default designs.
Put the
duck-faced
surfboard away.More Xbox news at gamesradar.com/oxm THE OFFICIAL XBOX MAGAZINE 083