Imagine John Wick, mixed with the Matrix and then with a sprinkle of Furry in the mix. Well, you’ve got Overgrowth. I do not know if Keanu Reeves is a secret Furry but I am glad I managed to jam at least two Keanu Reeves references in a review! Especially this early on in it!

I got this game as part of the Humble Monthly service. I wasn’t too happy with the March Monthly as I got duped out of getting Dark Souls 3 for <RM50 because of some bullshit region lock that they didn’t openly state upon purchase. Instead I got Sid Meier’s Civilisations Beyond Earth… and I am not even into those sort of games. Ah well, will have to try it out when I get to it. Anyhoo, my frustrations with this game are not in any way related to the Humble Monthly mixup. I am reviewing this game as impartially as possible.

This game is split into three modes for playing it. One is the main story, one is a prequel and lastly, there are the mods. For the sake of this review, I will only be reviewing the main story and the prequel as mods are a pain in the ass to review due to the high variance among them.

Once again, I will be used my PAG model as with my previous game reviews. Plot, Aesthetic and Gameplay!

Plot

The plot in this game is as generic as it gets. Actually, no. It isn’t even generic. The plot is just an excuse to move along the narrative. In Overgrowth, you are trying to free some rabbit slaves from cats. After doing so, you have to go to a sky temple to convince the chief to let the slaves in. No twists. No character development. No signs of humanity in our main character. Let’s go do this? Okay! That’s where it ends. A great example of how flawed the design of this character is when he has to kill his own comrades to progress in an arena setting. He needs to kill them to be able to kill the boss. There was no hesitation in his dialogue. He was like, “Sure!” when being told that he needs to murder his own allies! What sort of dumbass writing is that!

The prequel does show some backstory to the main character, Turner. However, even then, it is still generic as all hell. His family is killed by bunny bandits, so he goes and kills them. Then, he discovers that cats are enslaving bunnies and goes to the main plot of the game.

The plot is also insanely short. If it weren’t for some flaws that I will discuss below, I think it is possible to complete the whole game is 3 hours or less. If I were to buy this game for full price at the Steam Store (at around RM 50), I would be extremely disappointed.

Overall, my main complaint with the plot is how barren this game is. It is as if no one was hired to write for this game. It was as if the whole game was done by a graphic designer and a programmer. The dialogue was always clunky, generic and uninteresting. They didn’t hire any voice actors to give some character to these characters so I progressed through the game being unable to care for any of these furry creatures.

Aesthetic

This is the game’s strongest point. Everything about this game is really beautiful. The character models, the landscape, the action. All of it is actually really nice to look at.

It is really cool how you character can physically deteriorate as the battle goes on being bloodied and holding his wounds. However, it is a shame that the wounds don’t carry on through the game. This is due to how each map is individually loaded from scratch. So, nothing carries over from previous parts of the game. This makes it really weird when you acquire a weapon in a previous map that could really give you an edge in combat, you lose it in favour of a tiny knife when you load up the next map.

The sound design in the game is as generic as it gets with its martial arts music. The music isn’t bad but it is just meh. Actually, this game could be described completely with this one word… “meh”. Nothing about the sound design really impressed me.

Gameplay

I have a super-duper love-hate relationship with the gameplay of this game. Firstly, it is cool at first to go all John Wick on anthropomorphic creatures. Hand-to-hand combat is really fun and simple in this game. It is all done by using the mouse. Left click is for attacks while right click is for counters and stealth kills. However, as I progressed through the game, the combat became very repetitive once I found the most overpowered technique – The Jump Kick. When you jump and kick onto an enemy, you are dealing a lot of damage and can start a chain of jump kicks on other enemies, bouncing around until your enemies are dead. With a little practice, this technique becomes impossible to lose with as enemies have no counter to it. At that point, there is no real incentive to using any other technique unless jump kicking on that stage will launch you to your death.

Speaking about launching people to their death. This game has a secondary mechanic! Its parkour mechanic, which is only used in the main game and not the prequel. This was the main source of my frustration at first. This was because the learning curve to getting the jumps right was really high. You had to time your jumps down to the second or else, you would fall to your doom. Thankfully, there is a checkpoint system. However, to get there, you have to take the long way down. When you fall, you have to wait till your character hits the ground before you can restart. This is a colossal pain in my ass as I have to find the most efficient way to kill myself before I hit the ground. Whether it is veering to a branch above the ground or slamming on a cliffside. Overall, very unpleasant. The parkour element was such a turnoff that I was planning on not playing the game to its completion. Then, I remembered that I wanted to write about it on Steemit… and well, here we are!

The map-size of each level is really huge. This is both good and bad. The good thing is that you will rarely encounter invisible walls that ruin the illusion of the open world nature of the game. However, the bad thing is that due to limited enemies, the maps become very empty.

Last Words

A word to describe this game would be… barren. It is a game with so little substance and so little joy. Honestly, it feels more like something a student would make for their Final Year Project. It is done to hit the right points on a gameplay level but that’s it. There is no personality and no charm behind this game. I would recommend people not the buy this game. The quality of the game is not worth the price tag. However, if you can get this for free or for really cheap (like I did), this game will not offend you.

Aesthetically pleasant with some fun hand-to-hand combat before discovering the OP Jump Kick. All in all, I would give this game a 4.5/10. It is worth trying out but only if you have no investment or expectations of it.

This is part of the TS Gaming Series. Feel free to check out my other posts in this series:
Beginner’s Guide to EDH
Bioshock Remastered
Bioshock Infinite
Loot Boxes and Crack Addiction
Shadow of Mordor

Magic: The Gathering Card Spotlight #01: Teferi, Temporal Archmage
Magic: The Gathering Card Spotlight #02: Archangel of Thune
Magic: The Gathering Card Spotlight #03: Pack Rat

Image Sources:
Overgrowth Steam Banner by Wario64i
Armchair Arcade
HRK Game