Castle Renovator Review (Xbox One)

STAFF REVIEW of Castle Renovator (Xbox One)

Tuesday, December 20, 2022.
by Kirsten Naughton

I don’t know if I’ve said this enough in my recent reviews or not, but just in case I haven’t told you in nauseam yet, my absolute favourite video games are of the simulation and renovation genre. The idea of building something from nothing, cleaning up garbage in abandoned train stations, flipping houses for hours and hours, or even building my own mega farm and becoming a billionaire brings me the utmost happiness and joy. I also have a knack for being a completionist. I love side quests, unlockables and things that make me want to play a video game over and over again.

Now that I’ve caught you up once again on how boring I am as a human being, let me introduce you to Castle Renovators. The creators behind Castle Renovators are the infamous UltimateGames, responsible for such titles as my most recent review Ship Graveyard Simulator, a few fishing simulator titles, Deadliest Catch: Ocean Boat Driving and Fishing 2022 Simulator, and Priest Simulator among others.

Right off the bat, I was hooked on the idea of building my own kingdom. In my own head I’m the queen of my own castle, and the idea of being able to build my own kingdom 2x4 by 2x4 just made my heart sing with joy. The main “story” (if you want to even call it that) is that you’ve inherited a large plot of land from your grandfather thus you can finally build your own kingdom.

Once uploaded into your “kingdom”, you will notice there is a royal mess. There’s garbage everywhere and spills to clean up. But, you can’t even start working on your own kingdom until you learn the ropes of cleaning up someone else’s mess. Still interested? Going to your quest board you’ll accept the first 'mission' which will act as a basic tutorial. Once loaded, you will look on the top left of your screen to find any open objectives for that level such as pick up garbage, cut down a couple trees, put some 2x4's back in a fence, put some logs back in their spots and put some wooden boards down so you or your peasants won’t fall 20 feet to the ground. Not like there is fall damage in Castle Renovators, but you get my point. Safety first in my kingdom!

You might be asking, well how exactly do I complete all these objectives? I have tools at my disposal to help me finish all of the objectives. The three main tools for any level will be “Clean”, “Destroy” and “Axe”. Your clean tool is pretty straight forward; find a stain or a spill, and use a broom to clean it up. The clean tool is also used for picking up garbage. Your destroy tool is also simple, as it’s a mallet of some sort. It’ll destroy buildings or whatever you may need to destroy. The axe tool is simplest of them all, and will cut down trees.

There is only one useless tool that doesn't quite do the trick in terms of bringing light to a dark area. After the first level you’ll have unlocked a torch. Now, you can light things with your torch which is pretty cool, but don’t depend on it for actual light and seeing where to go. In fact, when it becomes night time, you’re in complete darkness. Don’t think about using your torch because every time you select another tool or attempt to build something or place something, your torch then goes 'bye-bye', leaving you in the dark with no way to see. This was the utmost frustration as I had an earlier problem with the lighting that was fixed (thank heavens), but the night time lighting situation wasn’t really resolved which made me a little sad and frustrated.

A queen doesn’t even get a flashlight. It’s so dark outside that when I’m walking around I feel like I’m playing Dead by Daylight and being chased by Freddy Krueger, Jason and whatever other murderous dude in the movies comes to mind. It’s not a fun feeling to have to wait in the dark for the day and night cycle to happen so I can see what I'm doing. There is an option to de-select day and night cycles, but unfortunately it does not seem to work. The day does transition to night whether it’s on or off. That’s probably one of two biggest deal breakers of Castle Renovators for me. The other deal breaker I’ll get into I’ll talk about shortly.

Most of what you’ll be doing will be what you were doing in the very first level. After the first stage, Castle Renovators expands your knowledge and teaches you how to build a house. Now, I’m self confessionally not much of a builder of houses, or a builder of anything unless it’s lego related, but Castle Renovators makes it very easy to learn how to build a house. With the resources you collect from the levels you play, you can utilize them to build houses and castles in your kingdom.

While in your kingdom, your tools expand a little, and before I talk about the building process I want to talk about the tools because they are a little different in the levels depending on what the levels require of you to do. The tools in your kingdom are Alter and Repair along with your normal Clean, Destroy and Axe. You’d think that there would be a build tool, but I’m not going to knit pick that to death. Alter is the tool you use to alter your builds. Do you want a stone, plaster or a wooden house? Keep in mind, to alter your builds, you need the required materials to fulfill the build. The repair tool is repairing things that have become damaged. Unfortunately, I didn’t use this tool much because I was far too interested in building houses and castles and completing levels to care about repairing anything. Let’s not mention that repairing things didn’t really come up often.

Now, there’s only one reason why I liked the building part of Castle Renovators. I feel like it was a fresh take on a renovation genre type game. I love being able to customize my houses inside and out and make things perfect, just the way I want them. The overall execution on UltimateGames’ part is a big of a let down though. I feel like the UI gets in the way of the build tool being an efficient success. You have to go into a menu which is somewhat like a marketplace, if you’d like to call it that. The control sensitivity on the moving to different sections is a bit difficult as well. I found myself to be waiting for the selection I wanted to appear in red or not at all. This made things a little tricky as I want to get into the groove of building, I want to select my items and get the hell out of there. It was not a smooth process. Everything in the build menu 'marketplace' could have had a better UI layout. The actual menu I thought was pretty cool was designed as a book.

If you’ve gotten out of the build menu marketplace and haven’t gotten too frustrated from going literally back and forth thirty times to build one house, congratulations! You built your own house. I found it really interesting to have the option of what kind of roof I wanted, to what kind of door and flooring. That was a nice touch. My only criticism and the second deal breaker for me is that if you’re sitting far enough back from the TV, it’s going to be hard to read almost everything on the TV as you play. From the objectives to the notes that you collect, I found myself squinting my eyes a lot and leaning in to focus on the small font. The only thing I found easy to read was when you walked up to a white light on the ground (I can only describe it as a 'walk up to me' kind of light), the lettering was spot on. I get where they were going with the idea of it being in that kind of era of time, but the fancier the writing, the harder it is to see on a TV screen from far back. A simpler font would have helped those of us with not the best sight even in the best situations to read and continue being engaged in what we are being taught.

Although the lighting, the UI and the font were deal breakers for me, Castle Renovators is still a solid renovation game. It’s got some bugs, some imperfections and some things that may irritate a well seasoned gamer who knows their way around a renovation simulation game or two. In terms of a recommendation, I’d play Castle Renovators if they fixed the lighting issue indefinitely and tweaked the UI to make it a little less messy. Other than that, I think I gotta tell grandpa I’ll politely pass on the kingdom offer.

**Castle Renovator was provided by the publisher and reviewed on an Xbox Series S**

Overall: 6.0 / 10
Gameplay: 6.0 / 10
Visuals: 4.0 / 10
Sound: 6.0 / 10

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STAFF REVIEW of Castle Renovator (Xbox One)

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