Developer: GRIN
Publisher: Rebellion
Rrp: £6.99 (Steam) and £6.99 (Humblebundle)
Released: 17th March 2015
Available on Steam and Humblebundle
Played using: An Xbox 360 Control Pad
Welcome to Mays Indie Cavalcade! Throughout this month I’ll be solely reviewing games created by independent developers. I thought I’d kick off this off with a game that looks interesting, so let us begin.
In the land of Ulrica something is amiss. Tin men patrol the streets and more and more little children go missing by the day. In the midst of all this Red Riding Hood is trying to solve the mystery of her fathers death.
As you might be able to tell this isn’t the story of Red Riding Hood that we all know.
Woolfe – The Red Hood Diaries is a third person platform game, it’s also the first part of a series (something I couldn’t find mentioned anywhere on the Steam store page). The game was brought into existence through the power of crowdfunding (Kickstarter specifically).
At the risk of sounding like Totalbiscuit, I have to talk about the options menu before I can go into the game proper, specifically the graphical portion of it. Any options you choose within that options menu have to be confirmed. Now I know that that is fairly standard practice BUT usually any options selected would be shown as unselected if you didn’t confirm. That’s not the case in this game, it’ll show that the option has been selected even if it hasn’t. It’s a minor issue but one that irked me.
Ok with that out of the way lets get on with this.
This is a game filled with ‘almosts’. For every part of this game that works well there is another that feels… Unfinished, or at least without polish. For example the sound assets usually sound fine but on occasion you’ll hear something that sounds very fake or ‘store bought’.
It can’t be denied that Woolfe is quite pretty, especially with the settings are maxed out. But the world feels sterile, you never see any sign of life beyond the enemies you meet and most of those are mechanical in nature.
The problem is even with everything set to maximum I found that occasionally textures popped in, and I wasn’t even far away.
Combat is not very well explained, sure they cover the basics such as heavy and light attacks, but when the more advanced moves appear suddenly there’s barely an explanation at all. You have mana jars that appear beside your health but you are told exactly what they are or even what they do. Only after some experimentation did I discover that they are used in the special moves.
Speaking of those when it comes to those the controls suddenly seem to go very loose, for lack of a better word. I’ll press the buttons and nothing happens… Until it decides to happen.
In this game the camera really isn’t your friend, and quite often is positioned in such a way that it can be quite difficult to judge a distance or even if the object your looking at is accessible to you. I don’t know if that was intentional on the side of the developers or an accident, what I do know is that it can be quite infuriating.
As I expected, Woolfe is linear, I didn’t expect anything more than that though, there’s nothing wrong with a game being linear but I take issue with the number of invisible walls that appear in this one. If I try to jump over a small fence to an area I know you can walk on I get stopped, which makes no sense for a character than can double jump.
The game takes narrative breaks from time to time where you interact with objects around you to learn pieces of Red Riding Hoods past and the world. These are unskippable and each item must be interacted with before you’re allowed to continue with the game. These breaks are quite short though and are generally quite interesting.
There are a great many things that are left unexplained when it comes to the world itself. For example (possible spoiler here) when you enter the forest level you find that it’s full of floating islands etc, why? Dunno it was never explained, at least as far as I found.
As I mentioned at the beginning of my review its part of series, which may or may not continue as the original developers have since closed their doors. There is hope for this series however as Rebellion has picked up the license so perhaps a sequel will appear someday.
This is the part of reviewing that I find so hard to do, but I can’t recommend this. It’s just too flawed, and a bit too expensive for its length. Throw on top of that that it may or may not ever be completed… Well, I just can’t recommend it in good confidence, especially when other games (like those listed below) are better and in some cases cheaper.
If this appeals to you perhaps try;
American McGee’s Alice in Wonderland
Giana Sisters: Twisted Dreams
Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time
