It was only logical that the idea of maintaining and expanding my castle would draw me in, as I had somehow avoided playing any of the extremely popular simulator-type games that were available in the wild. What could go wrong with my first attempt at the genre, Castle Renovator?
Everything appears to be.
Would you suppose that playing a video game is more appealing than a 9 to the 5-day job in Castle Renovator? It combines badly designed building mechanisms with the little real payoff, a dreadfully uninteresting “renovation” strategy, and performance levels that are reminiscent of playing Bubsy 3D on the PlayStation 1. Sorry for the flashbacks, if you ever had Bubsy.
It’s not all horrible, and if you, in your special way, love the banality of a game you can play without thinking, maybe that’ll be a deeper experience for you.
In A Manor of Simulating
You must get going right away using Castle Renovator. You are given a plot of land on which to construct your bustling town when you are dropped into your blossoming metropolis of “My Kingdom” (I had to modify the name for a trophy, hence the “z”).
Getting quests from the noticeboard and completing them is the main objective of the game. There is some explanation provided as to why you are performing these arbitrary chores, but I quit reading it right away because it is so boring. You immediately move to the equivalent level after accepting a mission.
You must complete several tasks on each quest’s checklist to successfully, er, “renovate” the place. This essentially means cleaning up rubbish, removing stains, lighting torches, mending furniture, or fixing the building itself. Each one also has a few notes and chests scattered around it, which help with completion and provide extra rewards.
The fact that half of the tasks in Castle Renovator don’t involve a castle is my first problem with it. You’re organising a standard hut, prison, or boat. Riveting. The second is that after completing the first quest, 90% of what all the quests have to offer has already been seen. The relentless repetition of the few things you’ll be doing continuously will make you bored long before the last objective.
Fortless Exercise
The process of performing quests is as mindless as a brawling peasant, yet completing them is necessary to acquire resources and money to construct your patch of lordship.
The only way to play the game is to press R2 to pick up everything on the ground. Cobwebs, wood planks, patches of cloth, entire barrels—everything. Where does everything go? I have no idea, but it has now been “cleaned.” It’s similar to the wet dream of a kleptomaniac, but without a satisfying resolution.
You may be required to use a broom or hammer to clean, fix, or destroy objects as part of some missions, however, this is usually just a matter of hitting R2 until everything is gone.
While fixing anything is a hassle because of the input delay with the radial menu and the laborious animations requiring the full Battle of Hastings to complete, sweeping oddly involves moving your analogue stick to make it run faster.
It is a boring busy job in its purest form. Not to mention the fact that you could now have to search the entire level for any errant junk you missed. A sandwich can be made with fewer brain cells than it takes to play Castle Renovator.
Now, occasionally, all of us want a game like that to unwind on the couch without having to think. Great, Castle Renovator has your Saturday afternoon covered if you’re looking for about 4 hours of that.
It simply struck me as being too unimportant for me to support.
Lord Over Your… Non-existent Subjects?
You’ll be sent back to your environment to construct your very own lovely castle as you advance through the few quests.
Castle Renovator has a reasonable collection of building mechanics as a result. If your town has any future residents, you’ll need to build down a variety of indoor accessories, foundations, walls, roofs, windows, and doors with R1.
The goal is to construct different buildings and residences—again, not castles—to rent to people in exchange for Flippers and resources. Each prospective tenant may have certain demands or expectations regarding the pricing, size, and amenities of the home.
Which, if these NPCs were present in your realm, would be a cool system. However, they don’t. Put a tiger, a bed, and a wardrobe in a 2 by-2 box, and call it a day. Who needs a toilet or a sink? Why would I make elaborate or logical homes if there isn’t any actual satisfaction in creating any of these structures?
It is also frustrating to build these buildings. The quick-access menu is difficult to use, the menus’ input lag causes them to shift the object you’ve selected frequently, and the automatic alignment of structural elements is inconsistent all the time.
It certainly tries its best to make me long for it to resemble King’s Landing after Game of Thrones, given that the goal of the game is to construct the castle of your dreams.
Last but not least, you can house specific NPCs who do show up in your town and “perform chores” for you, like cleaning homes or collecting taxes, but this just means that they stand at a location, you go there, press R2, and their mission is finished immediately. The NPCs are approximately as helpful while going off against cavalry in the muck as a swordsman is.
Broken and Dilapidated
Simulator games are fun, but I’m sure there’s a better way to make them. The fact that Castle Renovator performs so horribly is a contributing factor to my annoyance with it. If you didn’t feel queasy just from playing it, the actual act of creating castles and completing missions would be a type of cathartic fulfilment for many.
I say this because you’ll feel sick from the extent of screen tearing, texture pop-in, and input delay on camera movements. The poor technical performance of a game has never left me as dumbfounded as it did with Castle Renovator.
It looks pretty bad, with missing textures, poor lighting effects that make it practically impossible to play at night, and animations that are more flimsy than that oak tree on your lawn.
I didn’t anticipate high production values, I assure you. But Castle Renovator barely makes it to the minimum level of functionality at which a game should be regarded to be broken. Given the astoundingly bad performance this reaches, Kat reported feeling sick after seeing me play it for roughly 30 seconds. However, as I already stated, this type of game is intended for a specific audience. others who, rather than me, will benefit more from its problematic mechanisms. Given its premise, it is ironic that Castle Renovator is a bit of a mess technically.
REVIEW : Project Wunderwaffe (PC)
