If you’re looking for some screenshots click here to view all the ones I took for this game.




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, 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.

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 interactables, is a boon to know exactly what you have laying 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.

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 quicksaving, 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.

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.

TLDR: this would've been a fantastic game 20 years ago.

I wanted to love this game, it sounded so promising. My high expectations aside, it is an okay game. The central idea is there, but the execution is lacking. I'm going to keep playing to see it through as far as I can, but whew, it needs help.

Still giving it a thumbs up in hopes it improves, and to do that, it needs players. And a lot of money.

Pros:
+ huge map and interesting terrain
+ dynamic weather
+ open-quest system (not a prescribed order)
+ factions and reputation tied to story line
+ survival elements tied to functions (fast travel costs food/thirst or money)

Cons:
- writing is all over the place. There is some really philosophical and deep stuff one minute, but then VERY obvious typos and misused words/phrases and actors mispronouncing words and names the next
- dialogue is flat; you have to press to continue each line, and have no choices in responses
- except for the voice of Robin, the voice acting is really bad
- combat is boring and repetitive
- stealth functionally does not work well. Some enemies spot you miles away, others don't see you stepping on their toes
- base building is very limited with pre-determined housing and you can't enter a lot of buildings. They're not actually for a base, they're to craft and upgrade skills, so feels pointless. If you're looking for a base/town builder, this is not the game for you
- world does not feel alive. NPCs have no speech animation, you can't sheathe your weapons, so you charge around town waving a giant sword
- graphics feel vintage in a bad way, even on the highest settings

(I have added more to this review after playing more of the game)

I think it's important to say the following, though:

1. I absolutely, almost obsessively love Robin Hood. Just about anything and everything Robin Hood-related is almost guaranteed to make me really happy, except when it's REALLY bad. I even liked the 2018 movie, and I might be one of 5 people who did.

2. I LOVE games with a slow grind. Idk if it's my age or where I'm at in life, but I love love love a slow grind in gathering supplies, realizing you're short, and going back out into the wilderness to have to get more, rinse repeat ad nauseum. It's glorious.

3. When I played the tutorial, I initially didn't like the game. I kept playing because of point 1, lol. By the end of Day 1 of playing, I said it was beautiful, but the controls were a little clunky. By the end of Day 2, I said I really enjoyed the grindiness of gathering the materials. By the end of Day 3, I was in love with the game, and wanted it, even at full price. It completely grew on me the better I got at it, and now I'm thoroughly enjoying myself, super happy while I play.

4. This game is kind of made for me. I love fun puzzles, I love discovering treasure hidden in these puzzles, and I love hoarding wealth and base building and resource collecting. I am extremely biased in this game's favor. It has everything I've been having a craving for. The exploration is FANTASTIC in this.



The core gameplay loop involves upgrading your camp so you can upgrade your equipment. To upgrade the camp, you need a LOT of materials. You're not just done when a building is built, either; there's upgrades for each building, and those ALSO cost a lot of materials. Villagers in your home base can be assigned to gather things while you're off in the greater world, doing Robin Hood style things.


If you're ambivalent to Robin Hood, I don't know how you might feel about this game. At the time of this review, I'm about 5 hours in, and the story is solid but not life altering. I love Robin Hood, so I'm eating it up, and also hoping that at some point, I get some kind of explanation into who the Sons of Adam are, because I'm convinced it's a cult and I'm going to just mosey on in to some crazy plot line where they're eating hearts or something.


I love me a good resource collecting game any time, but being in Sherwood is a serious treat. I love the music, I love the ambience, I love the weather affects and the small details, I love the puzzles, the world building, the creepiness of every single Sons of Adam camp, and I'm just thrilled to be in this world.


This might seem silly, but when you change your gear, it changes, too. It's a really simple thing, but I actually really love it. It kind of makes me excited to put new armor on and see how it turns out.


As of right now, sometimes I just decide I'm done sneaking, and I run full tilt into a camp, because I want to Hulk Smash, lol. I am allowed to do this. I'm playing on Easy, which is probably a big thing, but sometimes I want to sneak, and sometimes I just want to run in.

I am ALSO not punished for wanting to use just my sword, or just my bow. You can absolutely shoot someone in the leg, and it will hobble them, which is actually quite neat.


After I initially posted this review, the game updated with content for a new Arena, a way to make money in the game. I'm actually SUPER stoked about this, though I haven't gotten to that area yet. I'm trying to 100% each area because I'm obsessive, lol. I'm excited to try it out, and excited to see another Robin Hood character appear.


I don't really want to say the bad in this case, so this is "the bad", technically.


There are times when this game stutters pretty bad for me. I have a gaming laptop that I got this year that is fairly new, but I am playing this game installed on an external hard drive, so that may very well be playing a part in the stuttering. Keep that in mind. Update: I moved it off of my external, but the lag persisted. The game however has a setting for capping the FPS, and when I set that to 30 (I don't mind 30fps), the game improved IMMEDIATELY. I haven't yet tried 60fps, because if it ain't broke, don't fix it, lol.


Hunting took me a hot minute to get used to, because a lot of game mechanics these days are almost standardized. When you think of hunting animals, you might immediately conjure up the idea of hiding and sniping animals who are all blissfully unaware of you at nearly all times.

This is not the case in this game.

You hunt by waiting for absolutely insane doe herds to run past, around, and even into you, then initiate a bullet time and pray your arrows still hit. There's quite a curve to the arrows, and sometimes, I think an arrow's going to hit and it absolutely does not.

Fighting can also be a teensie bit clunky and heavy, but I got VERY used to it quickly. Sneaking isn't quite so bad to me as others have pointed out. Yes, your enemies are bloodhounds, but you're supposed to be able to develop your sneaking abilities, so I'll hold judgement until I'm further in and unlocked a ton of upgrades for being soundless/sneaky.


This is an updated addition to my review. One of the biggest issues I've experienced is that there are certain mining nodes that I can't complete; as soon as they reach the lowest point, the final point before breaking apart entirely, I suddenly can't reach the node anymore. There is currently one silver node in the silver mine in Barnesdale that has this issue, and I struggle kind of bad with a lot of the copper nodes in the copper mine in Barnesdale.

It's not the BIGGEST issue, but it can be frustrating and it can take me out of the game headspace.


Sometimes, the voice acting is AMAZING. Robin, for example, is fantastic, which is great, because he has the most lines. Other voice actors are... whew. I think one voice actor tried for about three seconds to have an English accent, and then dropped it entirely and gave up part way through her lines. Other characters SEEM to be voiced by AI, or their voice actors are very wooden.

It's not the BIGGEST issue for me, because personally, I'm here for the grinding and being in Sherwood and the mechanics are excellent, but I figured I'd add this in here.


This is 100% a ME thing. I love Robin Hood, and I particularly love seeing Robin get together with his band of characters. This game doesn't start with that. Robin is already an established outlaw, and we've skipped all of the bits where he's coming into his identity as Robin Hood. Richard the Lionheart is already dead, and John is King at this point.

I would have liked it to have had a real beginning, with all of the characters introduced, instead of assuming the player directly knows who all of them are. While I'm obsessed with Robin Hood, I don't think most people are, lmao. Characters aren't really given any backstories or relevancy to Robin's life outside of just hanging out in the village, AT LEAST INSOFAR AS I HAVE PROGRESSED AT THIS TIME. I would have liked to see or hear more of Robin getting together with his inner circle, but maybe that's just me.


I have had a ton of fun with it and intend to keep playing. Heck, I'll probably wind up playing it again at some point after I have completed it.

This is an unfinished tech demo with Robin Hood name attached for marketing purposes.

- landscape does not look like English forests
- economy basically boils down to Robin being the biggest apple merchant of all Kingdom
- these medieval English cities have more tunnels than the Vietcong
- roadside musical, light and other puzzles breaks the little immersion you have
- combat mechanics makes you feel like you are back in early 2000s, and thats putting it mildly
- Base building aspects are poorly implemented and feels outdated, community storage is way too limited, unorganized, and nonsencial. Much of the same can be said about crafting.
- Opponents are wearing animal skins and whatnot, once again breaking immersion
- Most missions and side quests is where the game really shows how unpolished it is. It has arguably the worst escort missions I have seen in the last 10 years.
- Story is non existant, voice acting, with exception of couple characters, is rubbish
- Graphics are outdated

The game unfortunately feels like your usual RPG bloat without story to make it engaging. If you buy it for 10-15 eur, you might get your moneys worth, but I would advise against supporting this developer team, who now have announced that they will repackage this unfinished tech demo in a game mode as another standalone game.

Though I agree with many of the negatives from other reviews (AI voices, repetitive gameplay, buggy combat) the most glaring issue for me is that the devs made the infamous mistake/choice of using grinding as ''content''. You will have to grind over and over. The most annoying one is not because of the large amount of building, but because your weapons and tools are made of paper and need to be repaired ALL THE TIME.

Robin Hood - Gathering & repair simulator.

Again one of the neither thumbs up nor thumbs down cases.

It is a open world game with RPG-elements (so you exploring the map, get quests, and so on), but also survival-elements (you have to eat, drink, craft) and a bit of base building (mainly for crafting). A interesting mixture of genres and, most important, I had a good time playing it. However, don´t expect too much, it is rather a straigth-forward "quest-marker hunting" - with ocassionally mining and crafting whenever you think better equipment would be nice.

The controls are clumsy, the performance is poor at times, the quests are repetitive, the story is rather shallow and the dialogues are one of the worst aspects of the whole game, just nerve wrecking (sometimes incredible bad voice acting, sooo... slow...., plain dumb at times, ...). Building-mode is strange to use, as well as balancing-problems (e.g. you have a lot of different attacks, but the basic attack is the most useful and just enough for the whole game). The Idea may be amazing, but the game just feels like a mediocre low-budget-production.

But you know what? I know, it is incredible, not another 60/70 $/€ fantasy price? No a moderate price for a moderate game. And thats the reason why I give it a thumbs up! Because the price is part of the package. A nice game for a absurd high price is bad, a horrible game for a very low price is still bad, but a somewhat moderate game for a somewhat moderate price - yeah, I can live with that!

Man this makes me sad to write... I played the demo and it had me pretty excited to start building my own Sherwood forest. The game released and I promptly bought it.

Graphics are not great. But good enough with the theme and the building aspect (I thought).
Controls are janky, its hard to make precise and accurate movements.
I do not like the 3rd person (over the shoulder) combat at all.

I was willing to look past all of that until I realized how bad "city building" would be.
It might as well be a predestined layout and all you get to do is collect resources and tell it to build there.
I wasn't willing to go any further.
I do not want a linear game, much less a linear building game.

I'm gonna give this game a thumbs up despite it's many flaws.

The game's overall idea is solid. The devs took a chance at introducing a whole heck of a lot of different mechanics and design ideas to really give you a plethora of things to learn, play and experience here.

Is the game perfect? No. In fact I'd probably call it perfectly average. Despite all that it does here, it doesn't really do any one particular thing really well. It's all mashed together in a kind of confusing convoluted way and a lot of things end up lacking in the process.

Still, if you have a high tolerance for gaming then you'd probably end up really enjoying this game and thinking its super awesome. The biggest problem here is its complex binding of each of these mechanics.

The sneaking isn't very good. The archery is awful (Which is mega bad considering your playing as THE Robin Hood.) The base building is restrictive and awkward, the management of inventory and people is awkward. The U.I. is ugly and confusing. The combat is awful as well.

But the sound quality is great. The graphics are great. There's a large variety of stuff to do and sink into, it offers so much with a massive map to explore and exploit with a lot of different things you can do. So if gameplay mechanics don't matter much to you just gameplay components then it'd be easy to ignore it's flaws and really enjoy this game.
I could go on and on and on but I'd rather not do it here. Instead, if you'd like to hear more then please check out the video on my YouTube Channel (link below).

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6pJ1dTp3TUk

Otherwise thanks so much for reading and I hope I managed to help some of you out there spend your money wisely.

This game tries really hard to be an open-world RPG like a lot of other games today. It's an okay, generally positive experience - don't get me wrong - but it's mostly just okay. There are a lot of different features, like events where you have to stop an execution or you rob a tax collector like in the Robin Hood stories, the visuals are nice, you get to build up a village base, there's crafting, resource collection, lots of quests. But that's just it - all of it is okay at most. I think the game could use a little more work. If you improved each feature in some way to up the quality, then it could become a really awesome title.

Its rare that I review (if you can call this that) a game, unless its pretty awful. Its no AAA and it doesn't pretend to be, the graphics are average at best, but I'll list dislikes and likes not so much PROs and CONs as this stuff is what I care about rather than what makes a poor / good game. Some will be quite petty, so bear with me.

DISLIKES

- Characters mouths don't move, but their arms/hands sure do. There are many stereotypes about Italians that have nothing on the way the characters "speak" in this game. Either that or they're all auditioning to be the next wavey arm inflatable tube guy.

- We live in a forest, but maybe 1% of the trees are harvest-able in this survival game. I also spent an hour or two trying to find a very specific tree type. You need your axe handy in order for the harvest-able trees to stand out, so heaven help you if you're ambushed while looking for trees.

- How can I get up to that wall, ledge, roof? You might ask... there's a nice ladder right beside you, but that's just scenery. You still have very clear painted marks for any ledge you want to jump on. There's even a section where there are clear and present ladders, but Robin still has to jump for the bright green painted ledge each time. That's another dislike, the ledges needing to be highlighted and underlined, but that's nothing unique to the game.

- Weapons degrade pretty quickly, you might have a bow with 100 durability, each shot fired drops 1 durability. This being said, enemies drop weapons when you kill them, but are unusable. Granted some of them are spears and pikes, which Robin wouldn't be seen dead using, but swords and bows are also not lootable/usable. Neither are any weapons from the multitude of weapon racks dotting the landscape.

- one mission you're told to take a casket to a specific tomb in a graveyard. Your escortee even has the key. Once you grab the casket, he hands you the key and says to go put it in the tomb. Yet you have to wander the graveyard to find it. Shouldn't the guy with the key know exactly where to send you?

- some missions require intercepting treasure carts / prisoner transports. Once mission highlights the cart, zooms in to let me know its there. I go into my inventory to prep for the battle, and all of a sudden cart is gone. Not on map, not in visual range, just gone.

- Fella wants to be escorted through enemies to a safe destination, but insists on collecting an item of loot before you leave. Of course he runs ahead without waiting while you scrounge for said item of loot. Speaking of escort quests, if you get 10 steps ahead of them, you get a 10 second countdown to mission failure, regardless of whether the escortee is actually in any danger. No running ahead to kill threats while escortee hangs back.

- The Robin Hood story has many variants: Part of the game is about building a village and having his "men" build and craft. I spoke to Tuck for a couple of missions during the tutorial, and a misson from John and Marion. Much's father (who is at least a miller) mentions his son during a side quest. Alan a Dale is a quest giver for a main quest - I got to speak to him for longer than I ever did Marian. Given the limited interaction with named characters, theres clearly no "Merry Men" to join you for any missions. Though you do get to lead a hand full of allied (nobles you end up assisting) troops once or twice.

- One mission has a trashed castle, with a library that has its books scattered everywhere. Piles, individually, on tables etc. All where stone grey. No colour, just stone grey. Granted you eventually find bad guys burning books, but no other fire damage is noted, tables are intact, rugs / carpet are intact where the grey books are, and they're intact, so unlikely "burnt" books.

- a few times the subtitled text and the accompanying speaking where completely different.

- it can get a little verbose at times - old mate wants you to go hunt a specific stag, literally 2 minutes worth of exposition to tell me this hunt is important.

- not unique to the game, but lack of free saving. One particular boss fight required you to shoot at him, while doing a platforming run thanks to rising waters. This is also done while under attack from poison gas disorienting the character. Sadly you can't save upon entry, and after many deaths, each time you need to re-align your weapons and potions, or else go back to a previous save.

- different armours do different things, you have camo armour, for stealth and noise bonuses, padded armour for ranged protection, light armour for movement speed etc. Robin Hood can even end up wandering around in plate armour for meelee resistance, yet it has no penalties to stealh / noise / running. I was doing my run-from-the-water-platforming-boss-fight in full plate.

- Last gripe centers on Robin Hood Lore and is spoilerish: Since King Richard is dead and King John is the big cheese, clearly Robin isn't his best mate. After taking down the Sheriff, the implication is that he and his minor noble buddies take charge of Sherwood and make life better. Theres no indication King John has an issue with this or not. The "dun-dun-dun!!!" moment you always get to foreshadow a sequel comes in the form of a large fleet approaching, rather than a large force of Kings soldiers coming to burn Sherwood to the ground.

That beings said, there are a couple of things I DO like about the game:

- I've always enjoyed Robin Hood lore, so I could bear with it for the settings sake.

- I really enjoy the survival aspect

- I enjoyed the poison mechanic, you get to have your screen twist and blur as if tripping bawls.

- Despite escort quests having a very limited range to stay within before you fail, even puny civilians who cringe into a ball have a high suitability score.

You might have guessed from the dislikes vs likes that I can't recommend the game. In fact it disappointed me enough to put gaming aside for a while until Enshrouded or Nightingale are fully released.