REVIEW – MeanAstronauts’ game in 2024 is not great, but if it had been released in the mid-2000s, it would have been a free game two or three years later, next to a gaming magazine, because Robin Hood – Sherwood Builders would have been a good game back then, but today it’s more like a forgettable product.

Robin Hood – Sherwood Builders is an action-adventure role-playing game with base-building elements, where you take on the role of a classic hero who stands up to the tyranny and injustice that haunts Sherwood. Fight, craft, steal, and of course, help the locals grow and prosper.

Stealing for the poor is no crime

The Sheriff of Nottingham is to be lambasted, for he’s a bastard, sitting on a pile of wealth while the common people are poor. This is what Robin Hood is trying to help: he is a thief, but he is not enriching himself, he is enriching the poor. Of course, he has a gang around him, so Will Scarlet, Friar Tuck, Lady Marian, Little John and Allan-a-Dale all appear in the open-world setting of RHSB. Their mission is to help refugees and rebels. You start with a small forest hideaway, but with persistent hard work, you can turn it into a vibrant town. You can attract fugitives from the law, local peasants, and later even the people (and guards) of Nottingham. However, it will not all work out by itself, as we will need to keep a watchful eye on who in our community can be used for what, and what their role is. They can be trained to be guards, hunters, or craftsmen, but they will need resources.

This is where Robin comes in: you can get them with or without stealing. Eventually we will get to the point where our armed community can lead a successful rebellion in Notthingham and the Sheriff will be finished. The map is quite large and the area itself is interesting. The weather is dynamic, and it is entirely up to you how you approach missions, as the order is not fixed (reputation and factions are). For the survival items, it may seem unusual at first that they are not free. For example, fast travel. This isn’t Skyrim: it costs money or food to move quickly between two points, or you might get thirsty afterwards. There are plenty of things to pass the time, crafting is not limited, and the AI seems adequate for combat. Of course, you can’t always win, so it’s no coincidence that you can also sneak around, and if you get behind your opponent, you can take him out, because there are even killcams in MeanAstronauts’ title. Your opponent’s armor can be damaged and you can even follow the impact of an arrow with a camera. So in these aspects RHSB is not so bad…

The rich get richer, the poor get poorer

The game has several negatives that should not be passed by without a word. For example, the way the game is written. When it is both thought-provoking and grammatically incorrect, it is very disturbing and mood-killing. And it’s not just the subtitles that are wrong, because in some cases the dubbing itself is inaccurate. It also shows that this is mainly a budget publisher, as PlayWay S.A. was still selling games on discs at newspaper kiosks in Eastern Europe in the early 2010s under a different name, PlayPaper. MeanAstronauts is also a Polish team, and the accent is noticeable in the voice acting.

There are no choices in the dialog, and the combat gets boring after a short while, or rather annoying, because stealth doesn’t always work, because sometimes you can be seen from too far away, and sometimes the enemies are so idiotic that they hardly realize what’s happening to them. NPCs have no facial or mouth movements when talking, and there is no auto-save, which can be annoying if you forget to save. You can’t get into many buildings during base building, and the controls didn’t seem very good either. In fact, the graphics felt dated. So you could say that the game doesn’t really hold up today, but if it had come out in the mid-2000s, it would have been remade today and the world would be a bit more vivid in that version, because it’s also flawed. So don’t judge it too harshly at first, after a few hours, because a lot of things only reveal themselves in the gameplay over time. The demo doesn’t help.

Budget Robin

Robin Hood – Sherwood Builders gets a 6/10 because it’s not quite the quality of the MeanAstronauts product these days. Not terrible, but not excellent either. It is strongly recommended to download the demo and then consider buying. Not recommended by default (it’s not worth the 30 dollars), maybe for Robin Hood fans. Oh, and it is not considered a REAL base/city builder. It’s not Cities: Skylines, nor does it intend to be. But it could probably go deeper.

-V-

Publisher: PlayWay S.A.

Developer: MeanAstronauts

Style: RPG

Release: February 29, 2024.