Welcome to our review of Drake Hollow, a game with a serious backbone coming to Xbox One and we played the beta.
Team up with friends to build and defend villages of vegetable folk from deadly feral beasts in the blighted world of The Hollow.
Welcome to The Hollow, a blighted and dying place, and home to the Drakes.
Drakes are the friendly vegetable folk native to these parts, and they need your help. They’re hungry, thirsty, and need a place to sleep. They can – quite literally – die of boredom. It’s on you to save them. Build gardens to provide them with food, wells for water, and yoga balls and puppet shows to keep them entertained. You can even craft treadmills and solar panels to generate power for Tesla coils, electric fences, and other fortifications.
You’ll need robust defenses, as you’ll quickly see that The Drakes aren’t the only residents of The Hollow. The Feral have overrun the land, evil creatures that are looking to shred anything happy or good. Battle them one-on-one with a wide array of weapons ranging from tennis rackets to nail guns, bring your friends to lend a hand, and build your defenses so you can take them out without lifting a finger.
Travel from region to region, season to season, taking the Drakes and their village with you. Each region is over a square mile of territory to explore, dynamically generated and populated with each passing season.
You must balance your time carefully. What supplies are most crucial at any given moment? What does your village need? Metal from the supply caches to build your defenses, or crystals from the blighted regions to grow your Drakes?
Prove that you’ve got what it takes to help the Drakes and take back The Hollow.
Drake Hollow is one of those games that catches you by surprise. I started playing the game when I was a bit under the weather and really should have known better and gotten a rest instead of playing. I went for 4 hours in a row. Felt really bad afterward but not because of the game.
I felt annoyed that me feeling bad prevented me from playing more. I was so into this game. From starting the game, finding it slow and really disliking the audio, but the audio issue turned out a bug that caused one soundbit to be constantly on repeat. I restarted from a save game and that did solve things. Prerelease games can have these smaller bugs and I do look past them.
The speed of how you are walking around however is something I do not consider a bug and while it does allow you to really take in the atmosphere, some sort of sprint function to travel more quickly would be appreciated.
Now I also need to tell you what I really liked about this game so far. The atmosphere is amazing and you just feel whether you are in friendly or enemy territory. You are also always aware what jobs need to be done next. Basically all comes down to exploring tons of islands and make sure you get those Drake happy.
I also loved fighting in this game, the build-up of the enemies is amazing. Really easy at first and slowly but surely improving vastly as well as becoming a lot more formidable. The entire speed at how it unfolds is like the magic of this game itself.
i sing high praise of this game because it truly deserves every bit of praise I can give it. It looks and plays great. Aside from the minor issue of overall speed in the game and maybe that one time I fell down the light tower without any damage, nothing else really comes to mind.
In conclusion, if you love crafting games like Yonder eg, this game might be the best you will play in a while. More mature and serious in nature but awesome inexperience. If I were to give a score right now, it would be 9.5…
