Songbringer Reviews
Songbringer is neatly designed, written with wit and humour and has some fun gameplay, but it struggled to keep my interest through its entirety and I found myself finding it hard to replay dungeons after many a death.
Songbringer is a great example of the potential of procedurally generated dungeons, if only the rest of the game was at the same level.
Good adventure game with a large world to explore, unique items, and diverse combat. Suffers from many technical flaws however.
In theory, Songbringer should be excellent. As a procedurally generated take on the original Legend of Zelda, there's plenty of room to innovate with old and new ideas alike. Unfortunately, the old ideas feel derivative of better games and the new ideas are hardly revolutionary. The overall aesthetic and sound design do a great job at creating atmosphere, which makes it all the more disappointing when the level design falls victim to the typical procedurally generated pitfalls. Without attention specifically given to enemy placement, how areas connect, and dungeon design, Songbringer never sustains a consistent level of difficulty or quality. Procedural generation is a handy tool, but not when it's used as a substitute for actual level design.
I don’t think it is groundbreaking or the next biggest hit. The elements of the game are ones that have been done before and it doesn’t offer anything innovative to that list. Songbringer also doesn’t provide enough information on what its story is. When it does, that info is extremely vague and leaves more questions than answers. While it calls itself procedurally generated, the worlds seem exactly the same. Combat, weapons, and their upgrades were the only things that excited me about the game. If you are looking for a game with old school Zelda-like qualities, give it a shot.
Songbringer is fun and challenging. Unfortunately, the lack of a pulling force, supporting characters, more lore, something to that effect, will not grab every gamer. Songbringer is definitely worth checking out though if you have the slightest bit of interest, at $19.99 you'll get hours of fun.
It's not the deepest game, but it's smart, ridiculously pretty, and has me completely hooked.
Songbringer is a lot of fun, gameplay is quick and the world is fun to explore for the most part. It feels like it is created for multiple playthrough’s but once I made it through my second world I didn’t feel the need to go again. Had my first world not left me stuck, I may not have ever seen a second world. Fans of retro style indie games will find a space for this in their library, but again I can’t imagine even those fans going through the slog on a second world… and if they do it will be to just have a look at what else they could have ended up with.