It is hard to put into words how Sherwood Extreme made me feel. The more I think about it, the more I am perplexed. It gave me fun yet died the moment I looked away. Like a dream interrupted at the climax, It’s all too underwhelming or more accurately, it felt like giving giving someone consent but they just put you on standby.
Never the less, like a dentist checking on broken teeth of people who wake others mid dream, let us see if anything can be salvaged from Sherwood Extreme.
Shooty Shooty Sherwood
The gameplay is nothing too unique. Within the ragdoll-y, comedy physics reminiscent of Totally Accurate Battle Simulator, you play as a Robin Hood look-alike running down hordes of enemies.
With a bow, arrows and shield that can be upgraded as you progress, you have to complete a simple task: Don’t die, kill the boss at the end and take the final loot. Each mission takes less than 2 minutes to finish and there are only 7 of them.
Then what do you do after that? You ask. Well…Here is where the rug gets pulled.
Sherwood-ly That’s Not All!
Once you finish the 7 missions, you unlock a Horde mode. In this mode, as it sounds, you will fight horde after horde till you die. The map is a giant tree house that you traverse while fighting.
All your upgrades from the levels do not enter the horde mode as Sherwood Extreme had the amazing idea(Sarcasm as required) of giving you basic stuff and allowing a single upgrade per 2 rounds of survival.
The game also allows you to team up with friends and play this with strategy and all that nonsense. Which is all well and good if not for one glaring problem.
It is too Easy!
Child’s Play
The Horde mood starts with you at the top of a wooden tower surrounded by many perches that you can glide or zip along with ease. The enemies arrive from four gates on the four sides of the tower. So as the fight begins, they are on the ground and you are in the skies. Not to mention your character’s weapon of choice is an arrow. In other words. ‘I have the high ground, Anakin!’
I went round after round after round just dropping hell on the enemies and they could not touch me. By the time they even came close to reaching me, only one or two would be left alive and even they would be dead before they stuck. I could only imagine how easy it would get with friends.
In my first run, I had crossed the double-digit number for hordes and in the end I decided to just go to the floor and kill them there. Even then I died because I tried to jump between a rock and a tree, getting stuck via a glitch.
Done before it started
So like I said, it was like an interrupted dream. A rug pulled from beneath my feet.
My conclusion for Sherwood Extreme is that it is a grand concept but much less a game. The combat is fluid, the enemies, albeit easy, are very fun to fight and the map design for the very little there was, was very fun to navigate.
In Short, this labour of love is in need of more time in the oven of Love!
