Lumberhill (Switch) Review
Release Date: April 15, 2022 (Steam June 2021)
Publisher/Developer: ALL IN! Games
Platform: Nintendo Switch (reviewed), Steam
Price: $14.99 (release sale 50% off at $7.49, DLC $1.99, game with DLC $10.55)
Lately my family has had a blast with party games on the Switch. The pick-up-and-play attitude of the Switch really allows us to hop on a run of Mario Party or a wild blast of Overcooked. Previously released last year on Steam, Lumberhill tries to chop into the mix by providing an Overcooked-style chaotic multiplayer game with an outdoorsy skin.
From the start, I can tell that Lumberhill is heavily inspired by Overcooked and the like. Isometric style cartoony graphics for up to four players in cooperative or competitive modes, a list of tasks to complete with time limits, and plenty of zany antics as you work to complete them. Chaos abounds, and logging (and logic) eventually go out the window as you trade in herding sheep for dodging dinosaurs.
Most all the goals involve “move X amount of things around the map to point Y”. The uniquity of the game comes in how you do that. Sheep herd and run just fine, but a panda will chase someone who’s chopped down a bamboo shoot hungrily, and a triceratops chases anyone who picks up her babies. These unique combinations are fun in that you have to change your gameplan based on what is needed, but it does end up boiling down to “move this thing here.” Since many of them are “chase” activated, that also means you can’t do a lot of sharing/splitting tasks like you would in Overcooked. Taking on a task usually means you are the one who finishes it. Outside of those tasks, there are small maintenance things such as putting out forest fires. I’d say my biggest issue with the game revolves around having to grab your equipment. You don’t keep an axe at your side or a bucket in reserve; you have to pick them up first, or throw the axe down to grab the log you just cut. It doesn’t seem like much, but it’s just that one more step in a chaotic process.
There’s a technical glitch I’d like to see fixed in the controllers. As we know, the Switch has the ability to split into separate Joy-Con for multiplayer fun. Every time I did this, I had issues. The game wouldn’t boot to the main menu without a pair as one player, and then going into options to add more got weird as it’d be recognizing one controller, then there wouldn’t be an appropriate button for “accept” after you split it. It may have a logical way of doing it, but it wasn’t intuitive for me at all. Plus, the tutorial descriptors show a combined d-pad and say to press certain directions, but even when you estimate they are the buttons they didn’t match up. Once I swear the analog stick was 100% reversed on a horizontal Joy-Con, meaning all would be well if I simply held my controller upside down.
Technicalities aside, Lumberhill is a great addition to the party game lineup. It won’t win any single-player awards, as it boils down to a bunch of checklists to tick off. The multiplayer sometimes feels like a bunch of single players, as you complete tasks pretty independently, but perhaps creative players can find ways around that. The humor and chaos inherent in these games definitely means you should add it to your party rotation.
Pros:
-Wonderfully fun party game
-Unique mechanics on how to get your load to its destination
-Variety of environments and themes to mix it up
Cons:
-Minimal solo experience (default in party games though)
-Unable to keep tools on-hand
-Technical hiccups setting up multiplayer on single Joy-Con
Special thanks to ALL IN! Games for providing a code for review!