Demo's can do a good job of selling a game and for Dragon Quest Builders by Square Enix, it did just that for me. I was originally repelled from the game due to it looking a little too much like Minecraft. A game I had played out. Builders is very similar but does enough to not feel like the same old same old.
A Story-Driven Sandbox
In a world where you can build anything, you can find yourself spending hours mining resources from the land and constructing ever more extravagant buildings. There is only one problem. Once you are tired of that gameplay loop the game dies. Having played a sandbox at all could greatly reduce the enjoyment of similar titles. Dragon Quest Builders solves this by making the building part of the story.
NPCs keep the story moving. Its a thin story about a Dragon Lord who took the creativity from people and they forgot how to build. As the hero builder, you will show the people of the land you can build cool things. You start to unlock more and more items the further you get and the more mats you collect. The NPCs will then give you jobs to do like fetch quests or building orders. The pacing of this was fluent and you felt you were constantly getting new things to build. It kept the game moving and interesting.
While there are certain rooms you must create to keep the quests going you have free reign to build the base to your liking. Within a limited area that is. Each base is marked by a banner that you plant when you arrive; the banner creates a border around it that you will build your town in. The music even changes when you leave it so you can know where the boundary is outside of the visual line. While limited this area is still yours to build up using the land and other materials you gather. The more you build, the higher the level your base will reach, which is essential to keeping the story going. It's also a waste of time to build outside of the area as it does nothing for your level.
The game does give you quite the variety of different items. It does not have the depth that a lot of other sandboxes has but there is enough to find yourself spending an hour on one building because you want to build all these fancy things with some hard to find mats. I most likely could have beat this in a much shorter time but the buildings would not have looked as good and that is just simply not acceptable.
Combat Isn't Great
The land is riddled with baddies that are there to tear your buildings up and take you down. The problem is killing them can get a bit frustrating. At first, it felt fine with some trouble learning the swing distance vs being hit by an enemy but this eventually turns into being baffled on why your charged up attack missed. You can take damage by just touching the enemy so you need to have the distance down, which is a paltry distance. The characters swing is no more than a tile distance and constantly causes you to run into the enemy. When things get hot, it gets even worse. Even the projectiles are a pain in the ass to throw. A simple lock on could have saved so much trouble.
Along with the lackluster combat and amazingly frustrating boss fights (until the last two, which were by far the best ones), the story is nothing special. Each place has their own cast of character, none of which come out. The nurse in the second area was the most memorable and that's only because she shoots some mean projectiles when the town is getting lit up.
The graphics are pretty clean in this game and I didn't experience any bugs or slowdowns. The camera can be a little clunky when in a tight room but nothing too hindering. The music gets a bit repetitive and the flip-flopping of songs when you are working on walls bordering your base will quickly have you dropping the volume.
There is an Online Mode...Kinda
Tera Incognita is offered to players as an open sandbox. More items will be unlocked in this mode as you complete the story mode. You can share your buildings that are built in a designated area and there are other areas you can import friends or strangers buildings. I didn't spend a lot of time in here. Maybe if I am feeling creative one day I'll build up further but I was over it by the time I jumped in. One cool aspect was seeing stuff other people have built. There were a lot of cool building but I am honestly not sure why some appeared when I requested and others didn't.
While not being a console seller the game is a good fill in if you need one or you find it on sale. It won't blow anyone away but it does lead to some fun hours of building some cool building and traps. While the combat really hinders this game there is enough there that it doesn't kill the game. You can adapt to it. It's a decent pick up if you are looking for a mobile sandbox that looks better the Minecraft and has more depth. If you are already backlogged it won't kill you to ignore.
TL;DR:
Dragon Quest Builders is a decent Sandbox RPG. The building is fun, the story can be ignored, and the combat leaves a lot to be desired.
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