A quick tour of the e-shop tells us, at the time of writing these few lines, that no less than 7,000 titles are vying for our credit cards on Switch. Among these, a large number are party-games trying to make us sit around a bowl of peanuts and a playful video experience mixing fun and bad faith. We can thus cite the excellent Overcooked or Heave Oh who have been able to offer a unifying concept that exudes laughter. Many other titles have tried to take their place on the multiplayer fun podium with more or less significant successes. Lumberhill seems to want to try the challenge. Will it live up to these glorious ancestors, that’s what we’ll see in the rest of this babble.
It was by felling a tree that Leonardo became Saw
A party-game is first and foremost gameplay. Is this a reason to sell off the screenplay side, many suitors answer yes! And it’s hard to give them wrong as Heave Oh manages to bring us together in front of our screens without laying any plot, yet it’s hard to forget our adventures to help the Onion King in Overcooked. So where does Lumberhill lie between these two extremes? Well quite simply on the side of the total absence of narration. And we can only regret it as his universe lends itself easily to any facetiousness.
In the title of 2BIGo and ARP Games, we embody a lumberjack who must perform different tasks. Why that ? Nobody knows, but that’s okay, because anyway, we don’t know for whom either. Nevertheless, we start our game by having two types of activities: cutting a certain type of wood or bringing a certain type of cattle home. Why our lumberjack in a checkered shirt suddenly finds himself a shepherd, again, this question will remain a dead letter.
But let’s not quibble about the why and how to procrastinate and let’s get to work. Our missions appeared at the bottom left of the screen and we have a limited time to complete them. The resemblance to the marvelous Overcooked is immediately obvious. But if the latter had been able to put a good dose of frenzy in his gameplay by modifying each new command the menu requested, Lumberhill is content to ask us to always perform the same tasks already mentioned: chopping wood, bringing back cattle.
In an effort, more or less successful, to vary the situations, there are always several types of wood and several types of animals. If the felling only requires choosing the right tree, easily identifiable, the behavior of the animals is more differentiated. Between the sheep that are frightened by our presence and that we lead in shepherd dog mode and the pandas that only follow us if we have bamboo in our possession, we will have to apply the right method each time.
In art, all repetition is null
Unfortunately, these gameplays are repeated throughout the four worlds each comprising ten levels and only the level design will be able to modify the situations presented to us. But again, each world has its mechanics that repeat themselves without really varying. We will thus have to manage the precipices, use a hoist, build bridges with the cut wood, avoid the pterodactyls and the pirates, put out the fires due to the storms and that’s it. Where Overcooked offered a variation at each level with different positions, kitchens that went in all directions or changes to the level in the middle of our cooking, Lumberhill is far too wise.
The fun is not absent, however, and the levels follow one another with pleasure. It should also be noted that, unlike many party games, the solo mode is playable. The missions to be carried out adapt according to the number of the player, it is thus three sheep which will have to be put back in their pen when we play alone while with three, it will take more than ten and so on for each order. .
The command system is also very permissive since not making one does not penalize us in any way in terms of our score. It is therefore very tempting to carry out only the simplest missions to reach three-stars and to unlock the additional reward, represented by an ax, which then allows us to spend these on new outfits or new skins. Again, the score to be reached will depend on the number of players present in the game. They don’t necessarily have to share our couch since an online mode allows us to find our friends or find an available server to share a game remotely.
Unfortunately, at this launch of the title, the servers are non-existent and we have not been able to test their responsiveness. Local play is also not free of problems. Indeed, if the detection of a half-joy-con is effective, this triggers the appearance of two characters, the stick will control one of the characters, provided you hold the joystick upside down, while the buttons will activate the other, a bug no doubt, but which forces you to play with a pair of joy-con per player, and that without necessity.
We judge a shirt by its collar and a man by his shirt
Also from a technical point of view, the physics of Lumberhill is not beyond reproach. Our characters are fairly slow and you always have to hold down the run button with ZR to feel like you’re moving forward a bit. But this is only one fault among others. First of all there are those trees which reappear without warning, sending us waltzing very far into the scenery, causing us to lose precious time, there are also those trees which, once cut, disappear into a precipice without our being able to do anything.
These small deficiencies spoil a title that is nevertheless endearing at first glance with its colorful and shimmering graphic palette and its characters at the limit of low poly which caricature everything that spends too much time in the weight room. The details of the sets are quite numerous and we take pleasure in observing the world in which we have to carry out our missions. The unlockable outfits are many and varied, both for human and animal avatars.
The controls are not really a problem except that the title of 2BIGo and ARP Games is a real drift detector. On a pro controller that has never been a problem on any other game, we caught our character moving around on his own all the time. Since the settings don’t allow you to define a dead zone on the sticks, we had to break out a pair of joy-cons to make it playable.
Before concluding, note that a versus mode exists, in this one, we embody in 2V2 a team of humans against a team of animals. While the former are trying to cut trees, the latter have to stop them by running into them, again, it’s fun in one part and then we move on without ever having the slightest desire to come back.
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