MeanAstronauts bring Robin Hood to life in this RPG Base Builder.
Robin Hood – Sherwood Builders – Bandit’s Trail is the free prologue for Robin Hood – Sherwood Builders, which is an Action-adventure RPG where you must help the legendary Robin Hood build a sanctuary while fighting against the tyranny and injustice that haunts Sherwood. MeanAstronauts developed the game, although Robin Hood – Sherwood Builders – Bandit’s Trail isn’t the studio’s only title to come, as games such as Lord Bullfrog, a third-person dark fantasy action-adventure, and Incoming War, an RTS Vehicle simulator.
The Publishers are Playway S.A., a Polish company that has produced and published over 100 games on many platforms. They have published games like House Flipper, Occupy Mars, and Hard West. When you begin a new game, you will be introduced to the game’s story with a dynamic 2D cutscene detailing what happened to Robin Hood and his group. While you don’t start in the famed base of the infamous Robin Hood, you find out that the sheriff’s men burned it down. You will need to help Robin Hood rebuild and fight against the injustice and tyranny caused by the Sheriff of Nottingham.
While Robin Hood – Sherwood Bulders – Bandit’s trail has both an open world ready for exploration and easy-to-manage base-building mechanics, you must keep in mind the limits of the map that you can explore in the beginning. You must first reach where Friar Tuck is and accept your first quests.
These quests introduce you to the basics of the game, from keeping your hunger and thirst bars full, crafting tools, building the base, and keeping it stocked with food. You will also receive quests from Little John and Marian. One of Marian’s quests introduces the Alchemist lab that you can build within your base. This allows you to make healing potions and other salves that will be useful as you go around dealing with bandits and the Sheriff’s men.
Little John will introduce you to some of the basics of stealth. You must sneak up on a lookout and kill him using stealth for his quest. Unfortunately, when you get spotted, you will immediately fail the quest and have to reload the checkpoint. After killing the lookout, you can tackle the rest of the camp any way you wish; whether you go in ready for a fight or pick them off one by one is up to you and your playstyle.
While exploring the world around you, you may come across different puzzles that are hidden behind nature or underneath it within ruins. While there aren’t any traps, they may keep you busy trying to figure it out. Not only will you come across puzzles, but you will also come across small events, such as destroying royal conveys, as you travel around the forests. However, you may want to save before you take something like this on; the Convoys tend to be heavily guarded.
Robin Hood – Sherwood Builders – Bandit’s Trail has a unique save mechanic in play. You are unable to save via a save button in the menu. Instead, you can either find a Stable master who creates an auto-save when you go near them or create or overwrite a new save slot while sleeping in a bed. Royal Convoys don’t stop if you remove the guards surrounding them; you must kill the convoy driver to claim the loot.
The loot can be incredibly helpful when building your base. Some of the mechanics in the base building are easy to manage, such as food and resources. However, if you are to make anything, you will need workers. The amount of workers you have depends on the population of your base. To increase population, you need more housing; each housing needs at least two workers to build.
You will also need the required resources even to start the constructions, you can find the resources out in the world while running around doing quests, but you can also assign workers to gather the materials and just check back periodically to add them to the base stash.
Unfortunately, you don’t have a large carrying capacity at the beginning of Robin Hood – Sherwood Builders – Bandit’s Trail. In order to increase this, you will need to invest perk points into the Strong Back and Deep Pockets perks. Strong Back increase carry weight, and Deep Pockets increase carrying slots making it easier to gather large amounts of resources or pick up everything you can when raiding an enemy base area.
Not everything is lootable in the game, but what is lootable and interactable has an orange highlight making it easier to discern when going through puzzles and lootable areas. What doesn’t glow is plants that are gatherable. You will have to make use of one of your abilities for that. This ability is called hunters sense; it highlights gatherable items as well as enemies and hunting quarries in a certain radius around Robin.
This isn’t the only ability available to Robin. The other ability is straightforward and incredibly useful in combat as it gives you time to react to the situation you have probably found yourself in. This skill is just known as slow motion, and it allows you to slow down time for a small duration of time.
When trying for a more stealth route to combat, there are many different factors that affect it. One is the visibility produced by the day-night cycle. You will obviously be spotted quicker in the daytime and have an easier time hiding at night. What also helps is the change in weather. From thundershowers and bright moonlit nights to fog-shrouded mornings, each bit of environmental weather affects both your visibility and your field of vision, which helps to give the game an immersive atmosphere.
If stealth isn’t what you like, you can go into combat swinging your weapon straight at the enemy or picking them off one by one with your bow. While the mechanics when you work with a bow are incredibly decent, the melee combat can use a little work. While the animations are smooth and would work well, it does seem a little underdone compared to the ranged combat. Having a dodge ability on top of the rest of the combat would be nice as your only option to get away when using dynamic combat. The setting is to sprint away a bit or make use of the slow-time ability.
The sound engineering in Robin Hood – Sherwood Builders – Bandit’s Trail is incredibly well done, from the sounds of the forest and the environmental effects whenever the weather changes creates an immersive atmosphere as you settle down to play the game for hours. The background music is great and changes often when you explore all the different areas available for you, including a smooth change over to a more combat-based soundtrack when getting closer to an enemy base or diving into combat.
Robin Hood – Sherwood Builder – Bandit’s Trail features some amazing voice acting for all of its characters. While some could use some work, others, like Little John and Robin Hood, have amazing voice actors who are able to carry over the emotions and feelings of their characters.
The graphics of the game are simply amazing. The forests and camp areas are wonderfully designed and make you feel as if you are exploring places that have yet to be settled by any humans. The environment’s special effects add to that, and it helps that the game has been optimized really well.
Overall, Robin Hood – Sherwood Builders – Bandit’s Trail is an incredible action-packed base builder where you walk in the shoes of the legendary hero himself. While there are some aspects of the game that could use a little work, its simple but easy mechanics to base building and combat makes the game perfect for those just starting with the genre.
