Riverbond Reviews
Although there's no doubt that playing co-op as a group of four will be more fun than hacking and slashing alone, the minute-to-minute gameplay doesn't feel satisfying enough to make this a game worth choosing over others in the genre. The objectives are really plain and the challenge and obstacles almost toothless. It might be a good first dungeon-crawler for a younger audience or a family that wants to play together, but this Riverbond ain't wide enough for me to recommend it to you.
Riverbond is definitely an appealing game, especially if you want an easy breezy co-op experience to wind down with.
Riverbond breaks no new ground but is an enjoyable romp through a highly detailed and eye-catching voxel world that accommodates younger players better than most in this genre. The bosses, as menacing as they look, aren’t quite up to scratch and in co-op, you can easily lose yourself in the action, but if you’ve got a brood of kids to entertain and a few Dualshock 4 controllers handy, you can easily get 7-10 hours of fun out of this game before the repetition sets in. Perfect for a rainy day.
A great looking co-op game that's nothing more than a simple co-op game.
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And that’s my biggest problem with this game: how tedious it is. You go through level after level and stage after stage, doing the same things over and over again. It doesn’t even feel rewarding towards the end, just a relief that the level is over. I really hate saying that, because this game had a lot of promise and is very pretty looking, especially for someone like me who loves that art style. I just wish there were a little more depth to the game, because as it is right now it’s very boring to sit through a lot of the time. I didn’t even mention the story that much because it’s very simple and takes a backseat to a lot of the game. For a simple pick-up-and-play game, I suppose it’s fine and serves the purpose of an arcade game well enough. But I don’t think it’s all that worth it, especially at the $24.99 price range where it sits right now. All in all I got about five hours out of the game, but I really wouldn’t recommend it unless you really love this kind of thing, or you need something simple and fun to play with friends.
For whatever reason I have a bit of a soft spot for voxel-based graphics so when I saw a dungeon-crawler boasting those aesthetics when Riverbond was announced I was easily on board...