Mable and the Wood Reviews
It's such a shame Mable & The Wood can't back up its interesting premise and impressive visuals with engaging gameplay. It's a unique take on the shapeshifting concept, to be sure, but navigating the environment is more frustrating than it is fun. There's a nice variety of boss encounters that keep the experience feeling relatively fresh, but overall, this is one Metroidvania that fails to live up to the hype.
An inventive take on the Metroidvania formula, but is let down by some awkward platforming and combat.
I am glad to see that Mable & the Wood was able to maintain the level of quality that I saw in my earlier preview. The platforming has a nice flow to it with a good balance of enemy hazard and platforming challenge. If you are a fan of metroidvania and or retro styled platformers I recommend you give Mable a chance.
People looking for something different will find it here, just know that it comes with some issues, but altogether, it is a decent experience.
Mable & The Wood's glimmers of potential get buried under heaps of frustration thanks to unfriendly exploration and clunky controls.
Mable and the Wood is a seductively whimsical fantasy adventure with excellent graphics, music and a lot of good ideas, but for the moment it is held back by balance and technical problems.
Mable & the Wood had a lot going for it: the promise of a Metroidvania, a slew of interesting mechanics, and a decent storyline. But the final product isn't worth your time or the asking price (even with a launch discount).
Mable & The Wood comes with an interesting take on combat, but shoddy controls, bugs, and odd storytelling prevent it from being an enjoyable journey through the game's cursed kingdom.
Mable and The Wood has a great idea at its core, and in some cases, it provides a compelling enough Metroidvania experience. Unfortunately, weak implementation of choice-based progression, along with some irksome bugs, hamper what could otherwise have been a great game.
Mable and the Wood is a side-scrolling metroidvania game with a unique combat/traversal mechanic. The form you start with and ones you unlock are fun to use for the most part. Reading the map can be annoying, but it's possible to interpret. Multiple endings offers more replay value if you're inclined to do so.
Mable and the Wood is a beautifully made gave that imbues a classic premise with new layers of depth.
Mable & The Wood on PC is really enjoyable at times and very frustrating at others. Furthermore, Mable & The Wood caused a full cycle of emotions while playing through the main story.
Overall, Mable & The Wood is one fun game. It is one that I will continue playing until I get all of the endings because I like it that much. It is a Metroidvania style game that has slight changes from the original type. There is not yet a price for the game listed but we will update this once it is available. If you guys are looking for a fun game to play then this one is highly recommended by me.
Mable & The Wood oozes charm from beginning to end and, even in a market that isn’t short of Metroidvanias, it more than distinguishes itself.
Unfinished perhaps proves the best word to ultimately describe Mable & The Wood.
Mable and the Wood is a game that has its heart in the right place, trying some interesting new things in a tried-and-true, side-scrolling presentation. Unfortunately, a lot of those ideas aren't that appealing and the novel ideas soon unravel into an endearing but merely decent adventure.
As usual, I find myself wanting to like games which just straight up annoy the shit out of me. There are some nice ideas here but I just got too frustrated after a while trying to get past sections which were just so much trickier than others, and required a lot of swapping of powers, and pulling off what amounted to combos of moves I just couldn't swing with.
Playing video games should always be a fun experience, and if I find myself not enjoying time spent in a game, I begin to seriously question my use of said time. There were moments of Mabel and the Wood that I genuinely enjoyed, but bugs, glitches, poor design, and frustrating mechanics created an affair of disappointment. Considering I was actually unable to finish the campaign to completion, as well as the multitude of quality metroidvania adventures available on nearly every gaming platform, I can not in good conscious recommend a game that is, at its core, broken.
This is a game with great ideas but horrid execution, both from a technical and a design perspective, and it's really a shame.
I greatly look forward to speedruns of this title, as with its unique method of control and ability to skip bosses and enemies, the strategies runners will devise to get a good time in this will be interesting. It took me around two hours to complete a run, but with subsequent playthroughs, I’m sure someone will cook up something more impressive. Ultimately, I’d say the $15 Mable asks for could be trimmed to something a little slimmer for what one playthrough would provide, but for those who are interested in these kinds of “multiple run” games, I can totally see them being fine with the $15 price point. Mable takes a unique look at a kind of boss rush genre, and provides enough to make it differentiate itself from the rest.