GRINDING FOR THE GRIND’S SAKE

You Must Build a Boat is both the title and the objective of the latest effort from EightyEight Games. A follow-up to their previous game, 10000000, this game features a similar combination of frantic match-3 action with RPG-style combat and progression. There’s a lot more to it this time around – everything has been expanded in some way. Do the new features buoy a simple formula to new heights, or do they drag it down beneath the waves?

The entirety of the game’s plot is contained in the title. The visual style is similarly no-nonsense. Pixel art with few visual flourishes allow you to tell exactly what a monster or object is at a glance, but don’t expect to be delighted or surprised by anything you see here. The only thing really wrong with it is that the game makes the arguable mistake of adhering to a chunky, blown-up pixel aesthetic while resizing, rotating or moving sprites by a non-whole number of “pixels”, breaking the retro illusion. I don’t really like that kind of thing, but on the other hand, I realize I’m nit-picking. I did like the audio quite a bit; appropriately energetic chiptunes provide a suitable backdrop to the satisfying crunches that occur as the panels break apart. It’s easily the strongest part of the presentation.

Despite the title, You Must Build a Boat is not really about building the titular boat. It’s about what happens when you step off the boat and go adventuring on the shoreline. Taking up your sword, shield, and magic staff (do you have three hands?), you’ll travel through a series of increasingly bizarre locales, hunting various fantasy monsters and looking for treasure. These adventures take the form of a match-3 game; at the top of the screen, you’ll see your character running from left to right, and you have to help him out by matching tiles. To do so, you slide a whole row or column of the board so that three identical icons line up in a row, causing them to disappear. Each type of tile gives you a different benefit, so you have to pay attention to what your character’s trying to do. If your character is fighting a monster, you must match swords and staves to power his attacks. If he’s trying to open a chest, try and match keys to break the locks. Other types of tiles, like shields and item crates, can be matched at any time for a helpful boost. If you get stuck at a monster, chest, or other obstacle for too long, you will be kicked from the dungeon.

Completing dungeon-specific quests will let you expand your boat, giving you room to hire shopkeepers or tame monsters, which allows you to trade your hard-earned gold for an advantage in future dungeon runs. You’ll go back and forth between the boat and the dungeons, steadily making progress. It’s kind of impossible to mess up; there are no permanent consequences. You can only fail to move forward, and even if you do so, you’ll head back to your boat with some extra pocket change to power yourself up with. (The game realizes this, going so far as to declare “YOU WIN!” in large, happy letters every time your adventurer dies.)

It seems pretty mindless at first, and to be completely honest, after beating it I still think it’s pretty mindless. At first you can do well just by flailing the mouse around and getting lucky, but you’ll eventually have to pay closer attention when things get more difficult and intricate. Some monsters are immune to physical attacks and must be dispatched with magic. Some monsters are weak only to fire, meaning you’ll have a hard time if you didn’t save that Fireball scroll you got by breaking open a set of item crates earlier. Flying traps will cause you various problems if you can’t quickly match three copies of the icon displayed on the trap’s casing. It gets challenging, sure, but it never really gets interesting in a meaningful way. If you’ve beaten 10000000, you pretty much know all the strategy you need; you just need to learn how to respond to the new obstacles. Even if you haven’t, you’ll figure it out before the halfway point. Playing You Must Build a Boat made me realize, more than anything, that one of the important reasons 10000000 worked was that it was a short game. You Must Build a Boat unfortunately overstays its welcome.

The Verdict: 5.7 out of 10

You Must Build a Boat is one of those games that’s pretty fun until you get good at it. This would be fine, except that once I got good at it, I still had two-thirds of the game to go. In that time, despite all the upgrades I went through, nothing really changed the way I interacted with the imposing grid of colorful tiles, and I just burned out on it really quickly. There’s not even enough of a payoff at the end to justify the grind. I would recommend this game to people who really enjoyed 10000000 and want to play a lot more of that, but if you’re one of those people, you probably weren’t waiting for me to tell you to buy this one. Unfortunately, if you were expecting anything really new from this follow-up, I’m afraid there’s not much to report.

For more information about what the score means, check out our official review scale.

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Aaron Dobbe is an Associate Writer at MONG specializing in Nintendo but playing a bit of everything else too. Follow him on Twitter for a cute picture of an alpaca.