Genre: Platformer
Developer: Fabio Ferrara
Price: £1.99 (currently £0.99 in the Steam Lunar New Year Sale)
Back when Sony first entered the console war and the idea of full 3D gaming was new and exciting, it was the assumption of most game publishers that mascot Platformers would continue to be all the rage. Whilst the short couple of years following the success of Crash Bandicoot and Mario 64 is remembered as a golden age for fun, interesting platformers, it is all too often forgotten that it was also an age of utter unadulterated garbage as everyone and their mum tried to recreate their otherwise serviceable 2D platforming style into a three-dimensional extravaganza. On the one hand, this was a time of experimentation which gave us such classics as Spyro the Dragon and Banjo Kazooie. On the other, the inexperience of developers in working in 3D spaces and just a lack of understanding of what was and wasn’t fun also gave us likes of Croc 3D: Legend of the Gobbos, Earthworm Jim 3D, and the utterly infamous Bubsy 3D.
But, as ever, I’m getting ahead of myself. Woodle Tree is a 3D platformer inspired by the games from that short period of time. In it you play as a walking log of wood and are tasked with collecting fairy teardrops that will return water to the Woodle Tree (a sentient talking tree) saving the world from thirst. Play proceeds across half a dozen levels of platforming action, including jumping, hitting enemies with a big leaf, and more jumping.
Woodle tree falls down a lot of the same pitfalls as those early 3D platformers. It offers uninteresting platform mechanics, has an utterly terrible camera that constantly gets stuck in the least useful location, a vast number of entirely arbitrary collectibles, and constant, repeated one-hit-kill deaths that are backed up by a very poor checkpointing system. It also has its own special hell of poor design: the collect-a-thons aren’t merely arbitrary, they respawn when the levels are re-loaded, making gathering them less of an objective and more of a grind. In an especially poor bit of game design, entering a level locks the player into that stage until they either complete it or exit the game, meaning that if you accidentally choose the wrong stage (quite easy as the stage selections look very similar) you have to close the game and load it back up again to choose a different one.
If you stand under an elevator, you get pushed into the floor. The designer knew this, so what did they do? They put a hidden platform underneath so that you can jump back out.
The presentation is worse. Whilst the bright colours are pleasant enough and there’s some nice simplistic design to some of the character models, none of them have animation speeds that actually match their movement, leading to their dangling legs gliding around environments like noodles. This lazy animation is especially bad in the slippy-slidey ice world (every platform game has to have one!) where the dev didn’t bother to stop the animation when the player slides around, making them look like they’re still just walking. The rounded edges to platforms may look good onscreen, but as this actively makes the edges of platforms in some areas smaller and more treacherous this mostly just makes moving around even less fun.
And the music, good god, the music. Woodle Tree Adventures has some of the most astonishingly amateurish compositions I’ve ever come across in a professionally released video game. The game’s tracks are short, don’t loop properly, sound like early 90s MIDI files and are just downright discordant and cacophonous in places, like somebody threw notes onto a stave and called it a day. It’s downright awful.
Woodle tree is infuriatingly poor. It has design issues that should have been ironed out over a decade ago alongside brand new frustrations borne of poor design and shoddy workmanship. Any enjoyability in the pleasure of old fashioned 3D platforming is sucked out by repetition, poor controls and the horrible grinding music that just continues on and on and on throughout the game. Whilst there are definitely things to like about Woodle Tree, there’s far more here that actively annoys.
How long did I play? - 1.5 hours
Did I finish it? - Yes
Would I play it again? - No
