Hood’s Análisis: Outlaw and Legends

Today we are faced with the analysis of the latest title developed by Digital sumo and published by Focus Home Interactive. Hood: Outlaw and Legends it’s a game PvJvE exclusively multiplayer Focused on stealth in which two teams of 4 thieves will try to steal a treasure.

Admit that Digital sumo, on paper, offers a lot of interesting things in this title based on the character of Robin Hood. The game seeks to reward stealth and cooperation with your team to infiltrate a room full of enemy soldiers, steal valuable treasure and succeed. However, when things are going well, none of this works in practice and it all becomes nonsense. This time, Robin’s arrow did not hit the target …

Robin Hood and his story in a game without a story

Robin of Locksley, which was known colloquially as Robin Hood Using the hood to hide his face, he was a fictional hero of medieval English folklore hidden in the woods of Sherwood. The hooded outlaw was known to be England’s best archer and fought against the Sheriff of Nottingham and Prince John Landless, who used law enforcement to dishonestly seize the city’s riches.

The game offers us to assume the role of Robin or one of his 3 companions: Marianne, the assassin (his sentimental partner and belonging to the nobility in the original version), Little John, the fighter (companion and arm Robin’s right) and Tooke, the mystic, who mixes up melee and sets traps. Each and everyone with different skills and with a specific role in the group.

Right off the bat, here is one of the title’s most striking “but” s. Based on a license also known and rich in stories, the studio has decided to dispense with any type of narrative for its game. There is no campaign mode and the most you can aspire to at story level is some kind of token for each character that unlocks when you reach a certain level with them. The games basically boil down to getting together with 7 other players and hitting a map to see who takes the jack.

Hood: Outlaws & Legends is very low on content

And precisely on the cards, the title is quite short. Another decision that we, as a player, do not understand. It is more than likely that the developer will continue to work to deliver content to the game as the truth is that came out of almost everything very rare. There are only 5 cards available at the moment. They are interesting but very similar to each other and you end up learning them within minutes. In addition, there is only one game mode for now with that repeatability comes too soon.

Game development is still the same it will therefore not take long to discover all that this title offers. You could say that each game has 3 phases. The first is infiltration. With our team, we will have to sneak into a base, wall or fortification plagued by enemy soldiers controlled by the AI.

The second phase will be locate the key who opens the room that hides the treasure that must be stolen and that he always takes with him the Sheriff Of the place. This character is the most powerful in the game since you can’t kill him and it will haunt us without giving us rest. Fortunately, his mobility is very limited and he can be knocked out with bombs and other tricks to give our companions time to escape. It is actually very strange and unnatural to encounter an immortal being in this type of game.

Finally we have to reach the extraction area and escape with the chest, which will have to be reassembled by means of a winch activating a few pulleys. Without a doubt, this phase is the one with the greatest tension and, why not say it, the most controversial.

At the moment of truth nothing works as it should

It all sounds pretty good, but when the push comes to pushing it doesn’t work when you play. On the other side, there is another team made up of 4 other players who have exactly the same goals as you and who in the end do not add up. The symmetry in the actions and goals of the two teams does not work well in this game and in the end it becomes absurd. You can do it fatal in the first two phases and you will not get any penalty for it. Ultimately, you can be successful in getting the loot without having done anything memorable the entire game.

It is really unfair. How unfair is the matchmaking system itself which is, directly, broken. As level 1 novices we will get into games with level 100 people and the degree of frustration can be immense.

The stealth offered in the infiltration and key theft phases is compromised when one of the teams manages to seize the safe. When is it the game is going crazy, people start to run around the stage like headless chickens and become a man to himself. It makes no sense. The most normal thing is to go for sacking and that, aside from breaking the magic of the title, negates some stealth-based characters that don’t directly serve any purpose. It will soon be discovered that the enemies managed by the AI ​​are far from providing excitement to the game. They are more of a nuisance because what interests us is to focus on the cancellation of the rival team.

And that brings us, almost always, to the melee (save Robin who will take care of shooting arrows from a distance). The proposed combat system is quite simply a disaster. The movements are very slow, limited and awkward. I don’t understand how there are so many references in the fighting genre who have chosen to do nothing with it. She is very rude, she gives the feeling that this section is unfinished and that she has not received the attention it deserves. Maybe that’s because, in theory, it was a stealth game. A stealth that has never existed and that turns 100% of the time into pitched battles where it is impossible for the player to develop a satisfactory fight.

El Escondite: place of management and progress

After the games we will earn money and just like Robin Hood would, we can distribute it among the people or keep some of it for ourselves. We can visit our refuge, which functions as a hall and a management center. Here we can upgrade our characters with skills and perks and also buy cosmetics for costumes and weapons.

This is the only game progression that exists at the moment, with which players who don’t “bite” to get some skin from an item will soon get bored here.

Very technically fair

Hood: Outlaw and Legends It is not a technical marvel, far from it. Quite the contrary. It’s a fairly normal, decent title, but with textures from another era. In this section we have perceived a big difference between the different generations of consoles, being the version of X series clearly superior. In the version of One XFor example, the textures are extremely flat, which makes it seem like a very poor title graphically. the character design is very generic and the skins of weapons and suits are not too conspicuous or very different from each other. It’s incomprehensible how Robin Hood’s famous characters can have so little charisma

Another issue that we have encountered in the Xbox One and Xbox One X versions is the drastic drop of the frame in certain situations. The new generation title works at 60 frames per second with a punctual fall but in the last generation, it barely reaches 30 frames per second with constant drops in action. This fact, in addition to being an aesthetic drawback, it is a brake on the gameplay on these consoles because at such a low frame rate it is more difficult to hit the arrows, among other things. We hope the developer can fix it in a future patch.

In terms of music, there is nothing particularly noteworthy either. It is adequate and accompanies the action well but does not go further, therefore not too memorable. It is true that when the third phase begins and the action increases the music becomes more frantic and surrounds the title with some emotion. The sound effects, on the other hand, are very discretly and they have virtually no relevance in the title.

Hood: Outlaws & Legends is nonsense playable

As we said before, Digital sumo offers some things that are very interesting in Hood: Outlaw and Legends but, unfortunately, they are not put into practice.

The problem wouldn’t be so dramatic without it is the very essence of the work that is spoiled while playing. You can’t base your team-fighting game on stealth when the stealth itself isn’t working. Can you imagine making a GTA where driving is a disaster? A good melee combat system has also not been developed to counteract the loss of this stealth, which is why combat is, on many occasions, ridiculous.

The big problem with this title is that a series of very specific conditions must be met for this to work because, I repeat, the idea is quite good. The game would be nice if the whole team played together, but the normal thing is to each go to their own ball. It is communication and coordination with your group is essential to make everything work the way the developer had in mind. But, in addition, it also has a lot to do with the behavior of the opposing team and we cannot control that in any way.

As you can see, the balance is fragile and it is very difficult for a title. PvJvE exclusively multiplayer it works as it should when it’s so easy to break the gaming system. It’s a real shame and I hope the developers can fix it in the future with the introduction of more content or new features.