An open-world crafting game centered on flying a plane around chains of islands is a promising idea, so I was happy to jump in and check out Lou’s Lagoon. However, the actual game is very different than I expected and doesn’t at all deliver on its initial premise. It’s an alright crafting game, but it can be incredibly tedious, and the plane content is sadly lacking to the point that it may as well not even exist at all.
Lou’s Lagoon has a somewhat decent hook. Your uncle Lou runs a delivery company until he goes missing. The game’s plot focuses on attempting to track him down through several islands, only to discover he’s mixed up in events with sky pirates while attempting to unravel the mystery of a massive storm that endlessly plagues the area.
There’s not much to the narrative, of course, but it’s an acceptable way to carrot-and-stick your way through a crafting game. The obvious main promotional hook here is, of course, the plane, but this only disappointed me. The game world isn’t actually an open area, as boarding your plane takes you to a separate overworld where there isn’t much to do beyond crashing into some boxes and doing dull checkpoint races.
You could honestly take the plane out completely and replace it with a menu, and the game wouldn’t be much worse off. The flying is pretty solid, at least, but it’s just so insubstantial overall. You can freely fast travel to major islands once you fix their towers, but since the overworld is so small, it only usually takes 30 seconds or so to just fly to them anyway.
As a crafting game, Lou’s Lagoon seems fine at first. You use a device called a Swirler that basically sucks up items and looks and behaves like a proton pack from Ghostbusters. There are occasional enemies that attack you, but you’ll just circle strafe them while using this on them and they’ll leave you be once you extract a resource from them.
For the most part, the game is centered around progressing the main plot while gathering resources, upgrading your tools, and crafting items. The issue is that the progression curve here does a poor job of pacing itself properly. You’d expect to improve your stuff and find new resources as you go, but the game’s demands are often sudden and saddle you with a mountain of busywork at a moment’s notice.
In classic crafting game focus, this means you’ll spend a lot of time waiting for resources to respawn and waiting for slow machines to finish processing materials. This can get dreadfully boring, especially since your base island has so little to do and see on it while you wait. It’s also quite annoying to have to go back to your base just to spend 15 minutes waiting on machines only to fly back where you were after.
On top of that, you have a very limited inventory and can’t craft more storage, so you’ll have to sell overflow resources and buy them back. This all leads to a very tedious loop, even if the general look of the game and movement are all nicely polished
Verdict
Lou’s Lagoon fares decently as a crafting-based experience, but it frequently fails to live up to its potential in most other areas (especially in relation to its plane gameplay). Unfortunately, as a result, it’s a game that’s simply prone to getting in its own way.
