Humans kinda suck, don’t they? That seems to be the message of Koboo: The Tree Spirit, anyway. We come across a pristine forest, full of mysterious spirits and beautiful guardian animals, and what’s the first thing we do? Take an axe to it. Set fire to it. Pillage every bough, seed and flower we can get our hands on until nothing’s left. A fairly timely plot, considering what’s going on in the world. Hell, we might have already dealt the Great Barrier Reef its death blow. It’s getting rather scary out there.
So I was fully onboard with Koboo: The Tree Spirit‘s message. As someone studying Environmental Science, I was all kinds of ready to kick some human butt out of the forest. But while I appreciate Koboo: The Tree Spirit‘s message, and its rather beautiful graphics, I find myself taking considerable umbrage with the gameplay. Were Koboo: The Tree Spirit a film, I’d likely be kinder to it. Sadly, it makes some quite fundamental mistakes that drag it down.
Eco Warrior
If you’re the type of person who hates it when environmental messages are thrust in your face, then you might want to look away. Koboo: The Tree Spirit pulls no punches. We play as the titular Koboo, the last surviving forest spirit. All the rest have been cut down by the encroaching humans, who now infest the woods. We’re the last gasp of a dying forest and our mission is to cut down the horde. A tall order for a tiny forest spirit, but thankfully we’re armed to the teeth. It’s a fairly simple plot, but having humanity as the enemy is interesting.
Keeping on with the positives, I rather like how Koboo: The Tree Spirit looks. True to how forests actually look, it’s a sea of bright colours. Different biomes look visually distinct and show the seedy underbelly of the forest well. It’s not every game that can go from a peaceful forest glade to a derelict crypt. There’s decent enemy variety too, with various flavours of human to rough up. At one point you might be beating up potion-throwing scientists, only to move on to a floating monk. Visually, Koboo is lovely.
Most of my ire is reserved for the gameplay. But let me lay things out before I start to rake up muck. Koboo is a platformer roguelike, which encourages acrobatic combat. Essentially, Koboo is broken up into combat arenas across seven different areas. I like that these areas connect in different ways. You only need to complete three areas to finish the game, but you can go back and explore the other routes. So if you get tired of the forest, you can dip into the crypts and castles. There are also lots of weapons – and modifiers – that change up how the combat functions. I enjoyed the boomerang, for example, as it could ping neatly through multiple enemies.
Tree Hugger, Human Stabber
Unfortunately, I have problems with both of Koboo: The Tree Spirit‘s main gameplay themes: the platforming and the roguelike combat. In platforming terms, the basic jump feels rather strangely floaty. It’s balanced, perhaps, by the fact that there aren’t really any platforming challenges to be found. There are spinning axes, but these just knock us away. We also start with a triple jump and dash as standard, so if things get hairy then we can just sproing away without worry. It all feels a little unsatisfying.
That feeling spreads to the general combat as well. Hitting enemies doesn’t have much impact to it, beyond a screen shake. Heavier weapons like the spear or axe suffer the most from this. We might as well be swinging a feather duster. That said, Koboo does try and add some interesting notes. The crits are one. Rather than just rolling the dice, crits are specific highlighted locations on enemies. So you’ve got to get yourself into the right position to do the most damage. I rather like that.
It’s undermined by another design choice: the size difference. Koboo makes its enemies pretty big compared to us. They don’t feel huge, though. Their attacks are fairly small, and very clearly telegraphed, and the dodge gives us quite a few invincibility frames. There’s no contact damage either, so you can just jump into an enemy and mash attack until dead. The daggers ended up being intensely powerful because of this. Jump into an enemy, flail at the crit spots, and dash whenever the big red exclamation point appears. Add the abundance of poison damage to it, and most enemies folded before their first attack.
Koboo: The Tree Spirit – Pretty But Hollow
The end result is that I hit the credits in under three hours and beat all the bosses in under five. Extremely threadbare for a roguelike. To its credit, Koboo does its best to throw in other stuff. There are hidden rooms throughout where you can learn a bit more about the plot. There’s also fishing – with fish that will talk about the complexities of life with you – and gardening. Though these last two mainly serve to feed the combat, which really doesn’t need propping up. It’s nice stuff, and the writing’s alright, but it’s too little to hold up the experience.
I note that Koboo: The Tree Spirit has a roadmap on its Steam page. Maybe I’ll be eating my words at the end of the year. Still, it isn’t just more content that Koboo needs. It needs a rethink on its balance. There needs to be a counter for just hovering in every enemy’s weak spot. Without that, we’re left with unsatisfying and strangely easy combat. In a game that’s fifty percent combat, that’s not good. Koboo: The Tree Spirit might look pretty on the surface, but the core is rotten.
