Robin Hood Sherwood Builders – Good-Looking, but Terribly Flawed

“What is done is done; and the egg cracked cannot be cured.” – The Merry Adventures of Robin Hood

Pros

• Rewarding exploration system that promotes looking at every nook and cranny, with adequate rewards for doing so.
• Pleasant visuals and decent overall ambient effects, give better immersion while exploring.

Cons

• Tremendously bloated, copy-pasted content throughout the open world. All activities, from puzzles to combat, soon become overly repetitive and boring.
• The entire survival-crafting aspect isn’t impactful enough to feel engaging, but just enough to be annoying. It adds nothing to the gameplay other than tedious grind.
• Forgettable storyline in both the main plot and side-quests. Character dialogues play out with often bizarre English and hideous voice acting.
• Disgusting ultra-jank melee, unreliable stealth, and inaccurate ranged combat will make your life miserable, regardless of what playstyle you’ll choose.
• Cumbersome inventory quality-of-life; you’ll lose your sanity endlessly sorting out items in the most annoying ways imaginable while fighting the UI’s clunkiness.

Bugs & Issues

• The game doesn’t pause while inventory or character menus are open. Unsure if it’s a bug or simply bad design.

Machine Specs

• i9 13980HX
• 64GB RAM DDR5
• RTX 4090
• NvME SSD
• 2560×1600

Content & Replay Value

In 26 hours on hard difficulty, I managed to clear around half of Robin Hood Sherwood Builders’ content, before succumbing to the unfathomable boredom. Some replay value can be found in pursuing different builds/specializations; everything else stays the same.

Is It Worth Buying?

Absolutely NOT. I wouldn’t recommend playing this game even if it was free, never mind spending money for it.

Verdict

Looks are about the only good thing, for a world otherwise crippled by tremendous content bloat, encompassed by a train-wrecked gameplay that fails at just about everything it tries to accomplish.

Robin Hood Sherwood Builders – In-Depth Analysis

Premise, Setting & Writing

I don’t think Robin Hood needs much introduction; a valiant hero, perhaps anti-hero in a way, that became a synonym for the struggle of the downtrodden against the oppressors. This title remixes his classic folk tale to a more ‘gaming-friendly’ one, having you in charge of managing the Merry Men, Robin’s gang, as they run from the law and set up a base of operations in the fabled Sherwood Forest. Some iconic characters will be present in Robin Hood Sherwood Builders, like Marion or Little John to name a few, however, the acting and writing don’t nearly do justice to them at any point. This isn’t a narrative-heavy game, but not for the lack of trying: there’s an extent of lore and background to each quest and event happening in the world, however, they all pass on as unremarkable by either poor writing, genericness, or plain clichés.

The world is massive and dotted with many endless locations that are worth exploring. On paper, this sounds great, but as the adventure progresses, all its good looks and lush vegetation aren’t enough to mask the repetitiveness of not only activities, but also places, enemies and just about anything else. The amount of recycling in this game would make the most fervent ecologist look like a newbie.

Exploration, Puzzles & Secrets

Sherwood and its environs are massive, and you’ll explore all of them… only on foot, because in all his thieving prowess, Robin can’t, for the life of him, get a horse to ride around. Nevertheless, you’ll stumble upon ruins, enemy camps, villages and even full-fledged castles manned by the Nottingham Sheriff’s minions. Getting close enough to a point of interest will reveal it on the map, and you’ll be able to fast-travel around using signposts and stable masters, paying respectively nutrition or gold as cost for your travels. Because yes, you’ll have to manage survival aspects like food and water, which are anyway trivial given the abundance of supplies found anywhere – why even add them, if they’re a non-issue at any point?

Robin’s Hunter Sense, an upgradable active skill that highlights enemies, animals, resources and interactibles, is a boon to know exactly what you have lying around, however, its cooldown, even after upgrading it, remains too tedious for its own good. Mostly in ruins, you’ll find simple logic-based puzzles that often entail inputting the correct sequence of either blocks, notes, symbols or whatever else to open a gate that leads to treasure. Despite the variations on this baseline, you’ll always have to do the same thing: figure the order of -whatever- to open a gate – same archetype, slightly different execution, but after 20 or 50 it becomes a slog regardless. Less puzzles but more unique unto themselves would’ve been a better choice. Secrets are as well present but often trivialized by the all-seeing Hunter Sense.

Combat System & Bosses

In Sherwood Builders, not only Robin’s legendary bow mastery will be at your disposal, but also his flawless swordsmanship and uncanny stealth capabilities. With diverse skill trees and associated abilities, you’ll be able to specialize in the playstyle you like the most, in order to clear hostile camps, dungeons and encounters. From specialized arrows to advanced sword skills and lethal stealth takedowns, the ways to solve situations are numerous. All of this sounds exciting, right? Well, it would be, if not executed like an absolute train wreck.

First of all, melee combat is jankier than the worst Eurojank titles. Gothic 1 feels smooth in comparison to this garbage, to make an example. You’ll either stunlock enemies in a flurry of sword attacks until you run out of stamina, or get stunlocked in the same way by five brutes gang-banging you – blocking is stale, and riposte is useless since you can’t actually follow up a perfect parry with some kind of rewarding counter, despite the game stating so. Animations and combat flow are the lowest indie-tier trash you can imagine. Ranged isn’t much better, being a kiting game where you’ll try to headshot everyone while running in a circle, at least until your bow breaks for the 27th time in two hours, because weapon durability, like Breath of the Wild has shown to all, is a really fun mechanic.

Stealth is fine when it works, but it rarely does. X-ray, eagle-eyed foes will be able to spot Robin from miles away and from debatable angles, unless he’s in one of the conveniently-placed blue bushes around most camps and forts. Running away to reset enemy aggro and try again is common. Forget quick-saving, as this game still uses ancient fixed save points as if 1990 never passed. You’ll eventually get depression from fighting the grand total of THREE enemy archetypes in one of the exciting ways described above.

Crafting, Building & Camp Management

Your camp can be freely built and upgraded with a set of utility buildings, using the resources you get from the world or have your men passively acquire. Structures act as progress gateways that give you new recipes for weapons, armors and utilities once upgraded. Regardless of what you choose to craft, all swords and all bows will feel the same, play the same and no other weapon will ever be available. The grind of resources to craft vital utilities, in particular repair kits later on, will soak up a lot of time which becomes filler, while managing your stocks is a cumbersome work due to a crafting interface worse than Minecraft’s early alphas.

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