Gather some friends and prepare to hack, slash and blast your way through Riverbond, the latest title from the team at Cococucumber.
Riverbond is a funny, energetic, adorable and frantic voxel based, dungeon crawler. Up to 4 players can join together for some couch co-op fun and journey through 9 different dungeons on an epic adventure to restore peace and order to the land. Each dungeon is themed differently and enemies can range from different animals like pigs or crabs to cannon wielding parrots and bomb throwing books. Each dungeon is made up of a handful of areas with simple tasks or objectives before players must battle it out in a boss arena battle. Defeating enemies, talking to NPCs and opening presents are rewarded with points that go towards each players score. At the end of each dungeon, players are ranked on how well they do, this feature adds some nice competition between players but can be ignored for friendlier play sessions.
Players will collect a number of different weapons to defend themselves, these are often placed along the major pathways in each dungeon. Exploration is rewarded though, as hidden within each level is even better weapons to use and new player skins to unlock. Weapons include swords and guns of various varieties but certainly lean towards more humorous options like slapping fish, ice creams, umbrella spears and foam dart guns with over 50 in total to find. Before each level begins, even mid dungeon, players can choose a skin that suits them ranging from fruit, sushi, animals, special guest characters and content creators. With over 100 different character skins to choose from, players will most certainly spend a fair bit of time switching and choosing skins depending on their personal preference.
Each dungeon is beautifully themed and well laid out with lots of nice little touches and secrets for those with a keen eye. Levels are also highly destructible which we found to be joyously cathartic. Early levels can be a little slow at times but this helps to get new players familiar with the controls and the general game mechanics. Difficulty seems to be at a set level though which means that having more players will work in your advantage but having less or playing solo will prove to be more of a challenge.
Full of mischief and mirth, Riverbond is a fantastic couch co-operative hack and blast with a nice competitive streak that is best enjoyed with friends. Players of any age will surely love all that Riverbond has to offer.
____________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
Mat Panek, Chief Reporter
Retromancer – Collector, repairer & fan of retro games & tech. Atari to Amiga, Nintendo to Sega! LD, Zip, Beta and a proud dad! One half of the TiredParents on Twitch.
Follow Mat on Twitter and Twitch
Disclosure: Riverbond [Nintendo Switch eShop code] was kindly provided by Stride PR for this review.
