Riverbond Reviews

  • A Big RadroachA Big Radroach801,406
    01 Jul 2019
    21 0 1
    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
    Showing only comment.
    KanchanaburiIt can be said I am 'negative' but this game is a 4.5 for what it is. Calm, relaxed and peaceful, perfect for playing with kids.
    Posted by Kanchanaburi on 16 Dec 19 at 03:33
  • BlaizicusBlaizicus1,355,872
    12 Jun 2019
    11 2 6
    Riverbond is a game brought to you by Cococucumber. It's a small action adventure game with a very cutesy Box/Pixel art style, and the overall presentation of the game is very clean and visually pleasing, as the aesthetics of the cubic maps are inviting and friendly and all keep a consistent tone throughout. There are also plenty of hidden collectibles and items throughout that will make the most of the very small maps.

    Riverbond has a good amount of skins and hidden objects around, designed too keep your attention and give you some character customization to work towards. There is also a good range of different weapons that fit the tone of the game well. As the game is designed as a "Score Attack" style game, with one to four players aiming to gain the most points, the areas have enough small collectibles to find to try raise your score to beat your friends, however, I feel like there isn't much re-playability due to the lackluster combat style.

    The combat in this game isn't very nuanced in the slightest, with a very basic hack and slash at it's core with several weapon types you can find around the area. with a basic attack and a mostly useless heavy attack, and a range weapon that reloads as slow as paint drying, it is a tedious way of making your way through this game. This coupled with the fact that death really doesn't effect you in anyway, you just get teleported to the start of the map with all enemies that are damaged staying damaged, and enemies defeated stay defeated, so you can just run at enemies with your highest damage weapon and just face-tank your way through even the final boss of each stage.

    The game keeps a good pace throughout however, with a steadily increasing difficulty curve. The enemy numbers increase as you proceed through, so the challenge will slowly increase as you go through the eight different stages, with roughly five parts a piece. However the game isn't very long, and it will only take roughly three to five hours to finish, depending on how much time you spend looking for collectibles and fighting the creatures, which you can mainly avoid if the objective doesn't concern them.

    There isn't much more to say about this game, it's a very simple game with simple combat and simple design choices taking place in a well designed environment with a very easy on the eyes art style. It will keep you interested long enough too see the story mode through, however I can't imagine you will want to keep on playing past that single play through.
    2.5
  • BIG ChromerBIG Chromer623,989
    12 Jan 2020
    3 1 0
    **Please note - This review was written after earning all the achievements in both the base game and the DLC**

    Riverbond is one of those games that if you have XGP (Xbox Game Pass) you see and think, oh, quick completion and you download it. I expected to find a fairly simple game, with very little that would actually entertain me. Just grinding it out for the Gamerscore. Well I was actually pleasantly surprised. I have to admit, I didn't really read too much of the dialogue, as such, I am sure there is a brilliant story here I missed out on, and in all honesty, I could see myself replaying to hear it! What I did read however was decent and well written.

    I'll admit it now, I am in camp "Downloaded as its on XGP and I wanted chevos". So my review of the game is actually going to look at it from that perspective. How fun was it to complete? Very. I genuinely enjoyed Riverbond, it has a charm about it that I haven't felt with a game, and not one moment I spent playing it felt like a grind. Maybe thats because with 57 Achievements, your next one was always just around the corner, or perhaps its just I enjoyed how this game works, its shorter style levels, split up into adventures with a boss at the end.

    I loved the multitude of skins available to customise your character with, along with the vast array of weapons at your disposal. This does however bring my onto my first negative. Not being able to keep your weapons from adventure to adventure. I get why, as the highscore system may be a little easier to cheese if you can just collect all the best weapons in one adventure and use them forever. However by the time you get to adventure 6/7, the amount of enemies starts pilling up, as does their HP. Really, the starting couple of weapons begin to not cut the mustard at that moment. This in a way could be a positive, as Riverbond therefore forces you to look out for better and other weapons to increase your damage, and help you along the way.

    The other negative I have is the repetitiveness of the actions the game gets you to perform. Most are either "hold Y", "Kill x/x things" or a variation of these two objectives. After a while that does get a little much. Yet, I did keep playing it all through in a sitting.. so there must be an addictiveness to this game.

    All in all, I would rate Riverbond a solid 3/5. Its not your average XGP game, but it isn't going to rock your world either.
    3.0
Hide ads