Riverbond
Riverbond is a quirky action-adventure/dungeon crawler. Featured as single player but offers co-op couch play and a scoring system to compete against yourself or your co-op partners.
There are 8 Adventures to explore and you can choose whichever Adventure you wish to embark on. Each Adventure is filled with its own unique theme, biome, enemies, secrets, loot, NPC's and difficulty. Split into chapters or "rooms" to search, slash and shoot through. The story itself is a straight up classic; good vs evil and you're going to free the leader of each Adventure to take on the final boss.
Riverbond currently has some bad press with the claims of being a "copy and paste Minecraft"
It's truly not. The only similarity would be the signature block world art.
The game holds so many unsubtle references with movies and games alike awaiting to be recognised.
Now what does Riverbond bring to the big boy table of Indie games?
Destructible environments with implemented physics, pretty touches like grass re-growing when cut. No Health Regeneration (although you may as well get Health Potions punching you in the face mid fight) mini bosses and end Adventure bosses shatter into a million pieces as a grand finale. You also need to empty your ranged attack's magazine to "reload" which is a feature that is so rare, I admire it! Not to forget the beautiful pixilated finish.
Each Adventure has its own unique weapons to it which you will lose upon defeating the Adventure's boss but your inventory stores up to 5 weapons. Melee, ranged, club, two handed, dual, slap.
Briefly explained, the weapons are generally split into speed, knockback and damage. The rest I'm sure you can allocate the stats to each weapon but should be treated as a rough guideline. Testing of each weapon is advised despite your play style.
The downside of Riverbond:
Now I truly enjoyed this game. I've completed it on my own account and volunteered to play and complete on my friend's account too without hesitation. It's a joyful game to which I appreciate all it's humoured, artistic style.
My personal dislikes:
- You lose all your loot upon completing an Adventure to only start your next conquest with your basics. Like that shiny sword? Well tough.
- The game itself isn't difficult. But from Adventure 5 onwards. "Difficulty" just becomes code for "more AI thrown at you." Packed with ramped up health, damage, knock back and the ranged enemies being armed with up to 5 projectiles per attack.
- Now the ranged enemies stun you for a split second per projectile and being ganged up on by 2 or more ranged enemies in the later levels will kill you most likely before they reload for round 2. That specifically was the only a issue when I was trying a 100% completion speed run. All being said. Death is a option in this game so it's not the end of the world and challenges you to use a variety of weapons or strategic routes.
- The Adventures themselves take around 15-30 minutes to complete each, so is the change of pace really that bad? If you're just completing a level speed run. You can probably do them in under or around 10 minutes per Adventure.
- As much as I like running up to Objectives and holding Y. It gets repetitive to the point where I hear the progress bar when opening my fridge door now. It became a breath of fresh air when you get a destructive or a exterminate Objective. Until that idea was exhausted shortly after.
All of that doesn't matter though. The game works and is extremely fun to play! My nitpicking is just a concern raised but washed away by the charm of the game. It's not a game to be taken seriously. Just look at the price for instance. It's just a game for fun and as fun as Riverbond is. There's just this nagging feeling that it is simultaneously complete and incomplete.
The Brief:
- It's fun, silly and ridiculous for all ages. As if the Devs have made a game made for enjoyment than a game with the ambition to be a 10/10.
- Fantastic game if you're a parent wanting to play something safe with young'uns.
- Very easy game full stop. Minor parts where you're tediously outnumbered.
- Another easy completion for TA users. 1.6 Ratio with a estimated time of about 3 hours despite the TA page saying 4-5 hours. (Both my runs for 100% were 3hr 15 and 2hr 30)
- The community has rated this rather spot on. It's not a bad game. It's certainly not the best either and would safely hold around 3.5-3.8 out of 5.
- A delusional price of £20.99/Available on Game Pass.
- Tiny 669MB Download.
3.5