Also on: PS5, PS4, Xbox Series X, Xbox One
Publisher: Forthright Entertainment
Developer: Soma Games
Medium: Digital
Players: 1
Online: No
ESRB: E
I have to admit, I knew pretty much nothing about the Redwall series prior to playing The Lost Legends of Redwall: The Scout Anthology. It may be a beloved children’s series for a few generations of kids, but I can’t say I’ve ever read any of the 22 novels that make up the series, or even either of the related adventure games that apparently came out back in 2018.
I’m pretty sure that this didn’t impact my ability to fully comprehend the plot and the characters, since this is a kid’s game, and even by those standards this is a pretty easy story to follow. I’m even more sure, though, that not having any kind of emotional connection to the series made it really easy to notice the game’s flaws – and because there are plenty of them, it made it awfully difficult to come away from the game anything but bored by it.
My main reason for being bored by the game is that it’s a 3D platformer where your character – a mouse, like all the other heroes of the Redwall series – moves at a snail’s pace, and the game constantly expects them to run (and I use that term very loosely) across lengthy distances. I eventually discovered that I moved a little faster by constantly jumping, but it still felt like an enormous ordeal every time the game assigned me a new quest.
The quests themselves weren’t particularly fun either. Much of your time feels like it’s spent engaged in pointless busy work, which made the slow pace of movement all the more aggravating. It also didn’t help that the game wasn’t always entirely clear about what your exact objectives were – or, more precisely, once it gave you an objective it didn’t like to repeat itself, so if you were, say, trying to skip through the mindless dialogue and you missed what the game told you to do, you’d have no way of going back and seeing what you were expected to do, and you’d have to rely on written objectives that tend towards the unhelpful.
The other big problem with The Lost Legends of Redwall: The Scout Anthology is that it’s not just a 3D platformer, it’s also got a healthy dose of stealth to it, and every single stealth section is incredibly frustrating. One of the game’s core mechanics involves eluding rats (the sworn enemy of mice, obviously), except you move so slowly that even though they always walk the same route back and forth, avoiding them is way harder than it needs to be, since they can’t help but get a glimpse of you as you slowly plod past them.
On top of that, scent plays a huge role in the game – which only adds to the frustration of stealth sections, because not only can the rats spot you easily, they can also smell you if you’re standing in the wrong place. There’s the odd place where the game uses scent to its advantage, like when it allows you to sniff out the right doors or paths, but on the whole, it’s more trouble than it’s worth.
Mind you, if you’re a huge fan of the Redwall series, I could imagine that putting up with these flaws and foibles is an acceptable part of doing business. There are characters scattered throughout the world for you to interact with, and the way they all act differently makes me believe that it’d be awfully rewarding to see these different personalities played out on screen.
But if you’re not a Redwall fan, none of that matters very much. If you don’t care about the various characters that make up The Lost Legends of Redwall: The Scout Anthology, you’re just left with a 3D platformer where you move at a crawl and you’re constantly getting stuck in frustrating stealth sections. That may be fine for fans, but for everyone else, I have to imagine it’ll be a non-starter.
Forthright Entertainment provided us with a The Lost Legends of Redwall: The Scout Anthology PC code for review purposes.
