my name and overall favorite pairing would usually make me a very biased individual when it comes to this topic but honestly??? i agree, i prefer act 1.

i think act 1 was an excellent start to hiveswap, it was very intricate and made up for its small size with its depth, and i really really appreciate that. act 1 brought me into the world right off the bat, joey, jude and xefros are wonderful characters that you can really feel for their personality, exploring their rooms and reading their interactions was the best, and even though the puzzle-combat mechanics were a little janky, i was pretty disappointed to find that there was little to none of it in act 2.

act 2 is very VERY good when it comes to world-building, the sheer difference between the train cars is something i could analyze all day long, the backgrounds are beautiful and you can tell the team had a lot of fun designing all of the trolls. but for the gameplay and story aspects?? mmmmeh. the story continued off nicely, but it definitely didnt focus on xefros and joey too much until the very end‐which is understandable, considering they now have to juggle a whole cast of new characters too. but because there's so many characters, its hard to give them equal spotlight, especially more tedious when some trolls' only interactions with joey were glorified fetch quests.

the teals and jades, for instance, get waaaaay too much of the spotlight. in spite of my favoritism, i feel like the teal-jade car is a big slog to play through, and the time taken to explore the highblood car that i was really excited for was instead used to play a court segment that i only really cared about because tyzias and stelsa were a big part in it (lol)

even then, during my first playthrough i had a difficult time caring for any of the male troll characters in hiveswap other than xefros and marvus, i didn't care so much for tagora that i didnt even know his gender during the whole teal-jade car segment.... (but its more of a mess issue, than anything)

and the fact that 2 characters that should've appeared at the start of the game were cut, which made act 2 feel really hollow at the start of the game.