Slimecraft
(This
review is spoiler-free!)
This is my first foray into the Dragon
Quest series, so forgive me if there’s anything important to the lore or
overall themes of this game that I missed. Dragon Quest Builders takes a very
different approach to the action-RPG style of games, putting the focus on
building and crafting. Add in a world made entirely of cubes, and you’ve got
Minecraft: the RPG.
I like both Minecraft and action-RPGs,
so I thought this would be an interesting concept. And it is! A lot of the
ideas behind it are really creative, and I could see this going places. The
problem is the execution of said ideas is dull, uninspired, and not fun to
play.
Dragon Quest Builders starts you off
as a hero with the power to build, thrust into a world overrun by monsters and
sparsely populated by people who have lost their creativity…or something like
that. The story isn’t exactly compelling, but you can fortunately ignore it for
the most part. The characters you meet are boring archetypes you’ve seen a
million times before, and the only reason you’ll talk to them is to get quests
or further the game.
The first thing you’ll notice upon
starting up the game is that the presentation is absolutely dreadful in all
aspects. The graphics are muddy and not at all interesting to look at, and they
would look more at home on the PS2. With so many different games these days
creating blocky worlds in the wake of Minecraft sparking that idea, this is not
exactly one that impresses. The music doesn’t fare much better, with only a
handful of tracks that loop infinitely. Upon hearing the minute long theme of
my town play for about the millionth time, I was ready to mute the TV. Another
smaller nitpick is that sometimes other characters will say things at you via
speech bubble while you’re walking around. The problem with this is that
someone decided it would be a good idea to have the speech bubbles be white
text on a light yellow background, making it impossible to read unless you
either squint or look really closely.
With the presentation being a
disaster, you’d think the gameplay would make up for it, right? Well, it does
in some aspects, but fails in others. The main theme of the game is, of course,
building things, and this is where Dragon Quest Builders shines brightest. I
had a lot of fun constructing simple rooms of dirt and stone, even if they were
laughably simple to make. The most fun was when a villager gave me a blueprint,
and I built her a house exactly how she wanted it. I wanted to do more building
and less…everything else. Crafting is extremely simplistic, with the game just
telling you what materials you need to make something, and then automatically
creating it at a crafting table. You discover new recipes by taking quests from
NPCs during your quest. It’s not very deep, but fine for what it is.
Unfortunately, Dragon Quest Builders
takes the No Man’s Sky approach to the rest of the gameplay. 90% of your time
in-game is spent gathering materials to craft some new contraption in an
attempt to further the game in some way. An NPC will give you a mission to
collect something, you go get it for them, then craft it into whatever they
want, rinse and repeat endlessly. The entire game is one massive fetch-quest,
and it never stops being boring.
This wouldn’t be a problem if
exploring and foraging were actually fun, but they sadly aren’t. In addition to
being assaulted by the endlessly looping one minute long music track the whole
time, you must deal with the two worst parts of the game: the camera and the
combat. The camera is the lesser of the two evils, being player controlled, but
it always seems to be at a bad angle regardless of where you put it. Especially
in forested areas, it’s incredibly difficult to see what’s going on, because you’re
trying to find your character through trees or behind small blocky hills.
As for the combat, it’s literally the
pits. Simple and archaic, all you do is swing your sword until either you or
the enemy drops dead. There’s no finesse or skill to it. Hell, the game flat
out tells you fighting monsters is
pointless at one point, unless you need to kill one for a specific crafting
item. It doesn’t earn you experience points or give you crafting recipes. You
only level up through building your town. Instead, I found myself giving
enemies wide berths because I hated fighting them so much.
Did I mention that the fighting itself
sucks? Because of the awful camera and short range of your attack, it’s
extremely difficult to figure out when the enemies are in range of you hitting
them. So let’s say you’ve finally managed to position yourself in front of the
enemy and you’ve gotten a few hits in. Now you have to avoid the enemy’s
attack. There’s no dodge or avoiding mechanic, aside from a shield you can
craft. To avoid attacks, you must either flee in terror, meaning you have to
reposition yourself again, or just take the hit. Even worse, if you take a hit
and go for healing items, enemies can still
hurt you while you clumsily fumble around in your inventory looking for healing
items.
Speaking of the inventory, it’s
incredibly small and limited, only allowing you to carry just over a dozen
different types of materials at a time. It’s not a massive problem, considering
you can leave useless items in chests back in your town, but I’m the type of
guy who likes to be prepared for whatever situation may come my way in games.
The only time combat becomes remotely
interesting is when armies of monsters all rush your town at once. When this
happens, you can hang back and let your NPC villagers do most of the work. When
this happened, I usually had them trap the enemies in a corner and took on the
boss monster myself, using my incredible “hit him twice and then run away”
tactic endlessly.
Dragon Quest Builders takes an
interesting idea and squanders it under endless amounts of boring gameplay and
bad presentation. I think fans of games like Harvest Moon or Stardew Valley
might find something to like here, but as I didn’t like either of those games,
it just wasn’t for me. The exploration was slow and tedious, the graphics were
lackluster, the music just plain awful, and while I enjoyed building and
crafting, there wasn’t enough of it to keep me invested. If you’re looking for
either a building game or an action-RPG, you’d be better off looking somewhere
else.
FINAL SCORE
3/10
Bad
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