Robin Hood - Sherwood Builders, the proven action management software
Robin Hood - Sherwood Builders
The Steam Next Fest of October 2021 offers us a large number of demos to try. Among the many, we also dedicated some time to Robin Hood - Sherwood Builders, a sandbox action game with a management side inspired by the myths of the most famous English outlaw in the world.Here is our tried and tested Robin Hood - Sherwood Builders.
Woods
Robin Hood in a wood The starting idea is very simple. We are Robin Hood, the great outlaw who steals from the rich to give to the poor. Our life is not only made up of great adventures, but also a lot of daily work to make sure that a ramshackle gang of men and women can become a real community.Sherwood Forest is ours shelter and, with the guidance of Friar Tuck, we must expand our camp. In practice this translates into all those typical survival sandbox game mechanics.
We have to collect stones and wood, using the right tools such as hatchets and pickaxes. We also have to hunt deer for food. By spending these basic materials, we can free up some specific spaces in our camp, to create a furnace and a blacksmith's shop. By collecting raw iron we can create ingots which then turn into weapons, like a sword. We will also need to collect water to quench our thirst as well as cook food to keep us full. In front of us there is a large forest to explore, with other settlements where you can find merchants (who sell materials that we cannot easily retrieve with just exploration) but also soldiers' camps.
The playful philosophy of Robin Hood - Sherwood Builders would seem, as proven in the demo, the classic one of a sandbox game. The game, in its first hour and a half, however, is all too classic and above all uninteresting. The pace of play is very slow and spending minutes running back and forth in the forest to collect the usual three materials is certainly not satisfying. It is also not a fully interactable map, but there are only a few specific areas where it is possible to cut down trees or crush stones, which quickly reappear in the same place. The map therefore gives a strong feeling of being an empty place, a simple fixed background that has nothing to give us.
Village management
The building construction menu The management side of the demo only requires you to accumulate materials and build (in seconds) the buildings required by the plot, in order to start making ingots and then swords. It will be necessary to understand in the final product if the management of the village will be expanded: will it be necessary to create houses for new refugees? Assign them a job? Make sure there is enough raw material production to sustain them all? For now it has not been possible to try the mode in depth.The bulk of the demo is in fact linked to the collection of materials, a micromanagement phase that we hope will be as limited as possible. We must specify that the character can get higher quality work tools (another classic of the genre) and some skills (there is a dedicated menu, where to spend Skill Points obtained with the level up): these two factors will probably contribute to making you leaner the harvest phase, or at least we hope.
Combat
We can use the bow in Robin Hood - Sherwood Builders, both to hunt and to fight Robin Hood is also a warrior, however, and in fact in Sherwood Builders you will have to fight. Deer hunting is a simple target practice, mind you and in the demo the real challenge is the fight with a bear. Leaving aside the quality of the model and the animations of the animal, which certainly needs to be improved, we were particularly disappointed with the combat system.This mission is explicitly designed to try hand-to-hand combat (arrows make 1 / 60 damage compared to the sword in this fight), but it is almost impossible to achieve victory. Ignoring the fact that the bear automatically recovered his life during battle (for a bug, we assume), the combat system is awkward and woody. Robin can attack with his sword, but he performs with slow (as well as ugly) animation and sometimes it doesn't activate. Often, during various attempts to defeat the bear, Robin did not react to pressing the attack or lock button. Let's add that the power of the bear was high and that he had tracking and we are in a completely broken battle. Robin can also dodge, but this is an awkward move as it is only possible from the side and not back and forth.
The entire combat system, as tried and tested, should be refined if not recreated: we hope this is a provisional version, which will be heavily modified in time for the final version of the game, which for the moment has no release date.
Robin Hood - Sherwood Builders is a clearly sketchy game, with a mix of mechanics that for now do not allow us to understand what it will really want to focus on. The survival parts are all too classic, slow and uninteresting. The management side might make the whole experience a bit deeper, but the demo only gave us a hint of it. The combat system is the worst part for the moment. However, we are talking about a preliminary version of a game that does not yet have a release date: there is plenty of time to transform an idea into a real complete game.
