BARRICADEZ ReVisited is a Switch port of a PC game that honestly should have been so much better. Let’s talk about why. BARRICADEZ ReVisited by FlyPenguin Inc. is a scrolling-based mix of tower defence and survival. You play as an invincible robot tasked with protecting a baby in a cradle; this baby happens to be the last hope of humanity. Set against a wasteland dystopian backdrop where every night monsters come with one aim – kill the child.
Gameplay Modes
BARRICADEZ ReVisited has four modes. Story Mode, Challenges, Practice and Red Moon Rush. It is advisable you check out the Practice Mode before trying anything else. This is the only place you learn the controls and how to play the game. It is unfortunately the controls that lower the score of an otherwise wonderful little game. I honestly recommend the PC version over the Switch port. This is because the controls are designed with a mouse in mind (and occasionally even references pressing the escape key). This makes for very cumbersome gameplay when trying to move a ‘mouse cursor’ with a joystick. The touchscreen is also totally unused. You do eventually get to grips with it and its limitations, but it certainly reduces the enjoyability factor of gameplay. The Practice Mode is well thought out. It starts basic by introducing you to movement and progresses through the more advanced features such as crafting and upgrading.
Challenges, once unlocked, offer a fun ‘quick game’ mode alternative to the main story. There are six in total. Ranging from only defending the baby using certain traps to surviving for days against vast numbers of monsters. These challenges are fun, but also serve as a useful learning curve for the main game.
The Story Mode is a slight misnomer. There is no real story to speak of save for the background to the game. As a protector robot you must protect the last hope of humanity from hordes of monsters that attack each night. The story is a nice setting for an intriguing mix of tower defence and survival. You have it all available in this mode. You’re challenged to last 56 nights by going underground to gather resources and craft items which can eventually be upgraded. With these resources you can build a wide variety of structures, traps, and weapons to defend the baby each night. During the day you can repair these items, collect and reposition them and of course build more. It’s a lot of fun, working out patterns for the crawler monster types to never get anywhere; placing the best traps and devices to kill the ones that will cause damage as you wait until morning. There’s a good variety of traps from basic spikes through to platforms that will catapult monsters into carefully placed firepits, swinging axes, flamethrowers, and arrow shooters. Similarly, there’s a nice variety of monster types so that each night never feels the same.
Finally, Red Moon Rush is then the game’s equivalent of ‘hard mode’. In the main Story Mode, you get what I consider a ‘boss’ coming every seven nights. As each week progresses, these get harder and harder. In Red Moon Rush you only get the ‘boss levels’. I’d leave this mode alone until you’re comfortable with the crafting and building system.
UI
I mentioned earlier that my main gripe with this game is the controls on Switch and unfortunately this is most prevalent in building and crafting. The UI is clearly designed for a PC and there’s a lot of ‘clicking’ involved to cycle through tabs. It’s cumbersome at best and at worst it’s repeatedly pressing the wrong control or moving the joystick and ending up in a totally different menu system. This is a real shame because when you can get it to work it is actually a great feature. As you expand your arsenal you can build and engineer new things, combining items and ensuring your weapons remain stocked. It is fully fleshed out as well, there are no half-measures here.
Crafting in BARRICADEZ ReVisited
The gathering and crafting side of BARRICADEZ ReVisited often feels like the primary focus, without it you cannot build anything to protect the baby from the monsters. For me, it was the more cathartic part of the game. Set against a wonderful score the plucky little robot heads down into the caves to gather materials. All the usual suspects appear; wood, stone, sand, iron, copper, and many, many more. As well as these you can find chests that contain pre-made defences and traps. There are special blocks, presumably derelict buildings from the now wasteland Earth, which contain a random selection of an even wider range of resources. It was difficult to work out some of the crafting recipes as there is no clear guide. It became frustrating when I had an overwhelming amount of one resource and absolutely none of the other I needed to build a trap. This is more of a me problem but on numerous playthroughs this was the case. I wonder if either a) the algorithm behind resource drops needs tweaking for such low-level items or b) it isn’t as low-level as the items list makes it out to be in which case that needs altering to make it clearer.
BARRICADEZ ReVisited Review Conclusion
Overall, BARRICADEZ ReVisited is a fun tower defence game with a truly fantastic survival/crafting element built in. The graphics are just fine, and the music is a joy. The variety of gameplay is great, the variety of monsters is even better. Time control helps you manage your building and every seven days you get a more challenging boss to overcome. Similarly, as you progress things get harder overall keeping the game fresh and challenging. However, don’t play this game on Nintendo Switch. The controls are terrible for a console that has a touchscreen and joysticks and it ruins what is otherwise a solid game of this genre.
