This colourful co-op construction game is a departure from Sometimes You’s previously published titles, which tend to fall into either into the retro inspired platformer or abstract adventure category. By offering a different kind of experience, it sticks out like a sore thumb.
The idea is to lay down foundations and follow blueprints carefully to create buildings from different time periods, while “motivating” red-faced builders who appear to have eaten one too many artery clogging cooked breakfasts.
You control a foreman armed with a megaphone and must follow instructions shown at the top of the screen. This involves grabbing the correct building materials from the outskirts of the circular building areas before placing them on the ground for builders to use. Team17’s Overcooked appears to supply the bulk of inspiration, as every material requires a button-matching mini-game to prepare. Sawing logs, for example, requires three presses of the ‘X’ button. Weirdly, button combos never change, and in some instances, you’re required to prepare several bricks, tiles or planks in succession. Mess up a button press combo and it’ll eat into your budget, potentially preventing from perfecting a stage. That’s in addition to working within a time limit – another criteria to keep an eye on. Well, kind of – the next stage unlocks regardless of how sloppy or slow you were, which lends the experience a curiously relaxed vibe.
The controls take a bit of time to acquaint with, using LB/RB to cycle through building slots along with the ‘Y’ button to change from planning, creation and destruction views. There are at least text prompts to help and a tutorial stage to ease you in. There’s also a sandbox mode available from the main menu if you just want to mess around, although it isn’t quite as intuitive as it should be and lacks the structure of the main campaign – which takes a few hours to beat.
Helping to give the package personality, it leans heavily on the history of architecture, with each stage set in a different period, seeing you create Roman villas, Egyptian structures, traditional Japanese houses, and such. Each of these themes has its own background music and a few flourishes such as leaf piles and bellowing winds. New things are gradually introduced too, such as more construction materials, the ability to hire more builders, and tubs of paint.
While all of this may sound encouraging, Buildest severely suffers from a core gameplay loop that isn’t particularly compelling. There’s no scope for creativity, and as the builders crack on with construction automatically, you’re simply left to grab materials, match button combos, and occasionally yell at the workers to speed them up. The bigger the structure, the more time consuming this process becomes. Having to grab several of the same material to finish off a large roof becomes tedious, almost as if your reward for progressing is yet more busywork.
Even though it does have some fun touches (I particularly like the way the builders parachute off the top of a building when the ‘victory’ screen appears) I can’t see younger gamers being too englamoured by the need to follow instructions precisely; upon messing up, you’re prompted to enter the destruction mode to fix your mistake. Even when painting is introduced there’s no scope to create structures with funky colour schemes. Imagine if Minecraft only allowed you to build certain structures instead of creating freely and you’ll see my point. Had Buildest given loose guidelines – such as building a three-story house with a certain number of doors and windows – it would have been a much more open and playful experience.
All too real, Buildest is based around following blueprints and delivering on schedule and on a budget. Or to reiterate, it’s a game where you must follow orders. Its virtues, such as its steady sense of progression and lack of punishment for when things go awry, are overshadowed by its stranglehold on creativity and don’t necessarily work in its favour. If you’ve played the likes of Overcooked and Moving Out to death and are looking for something similar to play with a pal, Buildest is still worth a cursory glance – being at its best when played in co-op – but keep in mind that it will always demand that you adhere to its rules.
MAYO Games’ Buildest is out 1st Oct on all formats. Published by Sometimes You. A PC version launched in 2023.