Gangs of Sherwood Review

"The Gang"

Campaign

December 10, 2023 at 7:21pm
By Jason Stettner

This is yet another take on Robin Hood, with a bit of a steampunk type of concept applied. It’s cooperative focused, but doesn’t feature join in progress action but at least you do get a server browser I guess. It’s up to four players and honestly the game is really designed around that.

You can play it solo but it’s a bit tougher for sure. You are also fortunately able to choose between online and offline play right at the start, just in case the servers vanish after this one sort of fades away over time. Anyways, the story is about this entertainer talking about a resistance.

You play as this group in this city and then over time end up in the trenches of a war you’ve been apparently waging but were at a city prior? It doesn’t make a lot of sense story wise and it feels like parts of this were missing.

The concept may seem as though it’s like something along the lines of Vermintide or say Dartide but alas this is a strictly story structured setup lacking any real desire for replayability quite honestly. The levels are linear, and the game itself is rather short.

I spent about four and a half hours playing but could have cut that down more if not for the aggressive restarting level aspects upon failure. Outside of the main acts you do have bonus levels. Although calling those levels is a stretch.

Two take place in the same small circular room with one being wave based survival and the other being a brief boss rush. The other mission is you fight a large tank in a tiny rectangular space. It’s incredibly disappointing as had this been expanded upon for scope I might have enjoyed it more.

Gameplay

It’s an incredibly repetitive, often mundane hack and slash with some extra ability powers. The particle effects are lovely and the abilities look cool in action. They’re even more interesting when you’re with a team, it’s just a lot of this I basically spent by myself since the matchmaking or lack of basically makes it hard to connect with others for play. The combat does wear itself rather thin after a good ten minutes or so.

You fight the same enemies with very slight variations in one room after another. They use some bosses as standard enemies later that cheapen them out. The traversal aspects could be neat at times offering split routes but that aspect didn’t differ enough to make replaying segments unique. I did like the cheeky humor of the world, the running gag with fishermen was fun and some of the dialogue was enjoyable.

I do wish the dialogue was more unique however, as it’s not great hearing the same segments over and over. This game really could have had deeper replayability, and this missed the boat in every aspect in that regard. The linear world also varies to some degree in scenery and visual fidelity. It’s a dynamic 4k resolution where you can see that heavily lowering at times attempting to hit 60fps but there are performance issues present.

It also features Dolby Atmos for sound. I liked the look of the world, but did feel they could have taken some aspects of the environment further. The characters were all rather distinct and could interact with areas others couldn’t. They did a great job with their cast, but alas without multiplayer it does feel a bit out of place to have so many of them chatting without seeing them.

The Conclusion

Gangs of Sherwood is somewhat ambitious, but short and contains basically no replayability. The repetitive style of combat was exhausting by the end and rather boring about ten minutes into the experience. It just lacked that fun aspect that should have been easier to achieve within this type of game.

That’s disappointing as I thought they had some neat ideas going into this. The bosses had some cool designs, but making them regular characters or re-using them took away any aspect of the enemies being distinct. They used the same set of foes constantly so the combat didn’t really dynamically change at all.

The cast of distinct characters with their abilities was cool, to underused. I enjoyed some of the bouts of humor that were present and again, I felt like this had some potential. It just never fully hit the mark. It was short, minimal in concept and could have used an expanded budget to hit its full potential.

Read our Hood: Outlaws & Legends Review
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Gangs of Sherwood Review on Xbox Series X
Review Code Provided by DeadGood Media

Rating Overall: 4.5