1.5/5 ★ – Jim_Howdy's review of Turnip Boy Commits Tax Evasion.

I don’t like being negative but this game really was not my thing... To start off, the gameplay here is minimal to none. It’s a huge fetch quest with a few small Zelda-like mechanics. Combat is equivalent to the first Zelda game though which makes it feel very slow but that gets a pass (until they released DLC around it with an endless arena, which is so weird because the combat is not fun in the slightest). The game clearly took a ton of inspiration and had a love for the early Zelda games, there are dungeons with puzzles related to one specific item and overall it really feels like a shitty Zelda game. Puzzles were never too hard, most all of them were quite simple actually and I understood them in 5 seconds which made most of them feel like a slog or inconvenience to get through. And that combat system? There are bosses in every dungeon that use it and all of them come down to the same thing of: wait, use new dungeon item, bomb. Thrilling stuff, and honestly that’s about all that can be said about the gameplay or lack thereof. The “story” is abysmal and relies completely on this sense of humor that I can’t put my finger on but really doesn’t click with me. The “twist” ending really isn’t a twist, everything has a “meme” to it and nothing in this game takes itself seriously which I’m okay with... if it was actually funny. I will give it credit, if this is your kind of humor than the rating is probably way higher, the game is clearly riding on that and with it’s very short runtime of 1-2 hours that makes sense. It’s supposed to be a fun bite sized game so I wasn’t expecting everything crazy, but I will say I was disappointed by it. If it wasn’t clear, I wouldn’t recommend picking this game up. Maybe if it’s on sale for like 50 cents go for it. I personally got it for free on epic games and chose to play it on a whim because it was in some Nintendo direct way long ago. Just play a real Zelda game or something idk. “Completion” wasn’t hard as you essentially had to just beat the game to do so while doing a few extra things for hats or whatever. The stupid DLC was the worst part. Progression was incredibly slow and it didn’t even fit what the game is trying to do making it clash and really expose how weak the gameplay is. I hate being this negative but this game really made me feel like I wasted 3 hours of my life.