Welcome to our review of the block-building game that will make you crave for Minecraft or Lego: Worlds – Discovery, by studio Noowanda.
Discovery is, according to the Nintendo eShop page “The Ultimate Block Building Game”. I personally hope that Nintendo just added this line straight from the developer’s notebook, since it’s cleary a very bad copy of Minecraft – or heavily inspired by, if you will. At first glance, I thought it would be a combination between Playmobil (the avatar resembled a little bit of the character design of the Playmobil figurines) and Minecraft. Once I started the game, a shiver went down my spine.. It felt like, and looked like Minecraft, but remade with very bad pixelated graphics and stuttering animals that are just walking around all day. Oh, and if you’re tired of walking, you can always chose to fly.. ’cause, why not?
Studio Noowanda
Studio Noowanda is a small studio, with only Discovery, or Block Builder DX (that’s what it’s called in Japan), to its name. They developed the game for iOS and WiiU, where it was mildly received. Mostly because it had a big creative mode, where players could go all-out with colors, chickens and more. But this is also exactly the problem I’m having with this game. Discovery is a huge sandbox, where players can build whatever they want, without any purpose whatsoever. I get it, you call the game Block Builder, so you hand the player a block building game, where people can build race circuit, with lights and wires – oh and goats, hatching from eggs.
But it gets boring. You don’t have a purpose in the game, just build whatever your crazy imagination can think of. I created a house, made from glass boxes, grass patches, and dynamite. I wanted to blow my house in the air, so I added fire to the dynamite boxes. Instead of blowing my own house up, which I had converted to egg-hatching goat-storage, the whole thing turned into a lighthouse of sorts. The one thing they really did nail, is the day-night cycle, since the colors of the sky are great (at night/twilight), so keep that up Noowanda.
Lack of actual .. gameplay
Personally, I love to be creative, build stuff (as long as it isn’t Ikea), draw stuff etc., so yeh I have an imagination I can use. But I don’t want to pay 8 bucks for a game where I can only ‘build’ things, with, in my personal opinion, not the stunning graphics the game’s shop page is promising. I want a sense of purpose in these kinds of games. It doesn’t even have to be the ‘survival’ genre that Minecraft offers, but some kind of quest system, where you need to buy certain things or gather materials to unlock stuff would be great. The world in Discovery always starts, preloaded, with over 250 materials, which can be dyed in 15 different colors. I could have gone without this, and rather have any sort of achievement or unlocksystem, which would make the game fun, challenging even.
To conclude – Discovery is a block building game, heavily inspired by its older brother Minecraft. However, studio Noowanda really missed the boat here. They created a knock-off, which is just Minecraft on steroids, except for gaining actual muscles, you receive the bad side-effects. Sorry Noowanda, I’m rating this game with only 20%.
