Review: BOSSGARD

WHO’S THE BOSS? Do you want to be the boss? You can be in this game! BOSSGARD is an indie boss fight game that focuses on online or local co-op. It’s developed and published by Sand Sailor Studio. You might be wondering how you can be a boss in this. Well, it’s quite literal. You can bring up to 4 friends and choose to play as the boss while they try to defeat you! Sounds exciting? Let me tell you what we thought about it.

What we liked!

• Style: The style of this game is a little cartoon-ish. I found this pleasing for my eyes. The character design is lovely. I played as Innes, master of the bow, with her pet Fifi! It’s a huge sabretooth tiger, by the way, and it’s called… Fifi. But anyway, I played as Innes, and I liked that even though she looks pretty, it’s not the typical push-up bra kind of thing. She looks feminine without all that stuff most games do. She does have a deadly waist, though. Like if you have this in real life, you will break in two. It still looks excellent, in my opinion. So far, I can see 10 Champions you can buy with in-game money, and they all look unique. Of course, you are going to have the Bow lady and a Hammer dwarf, but yeah. Unique in design, very well done.
• Survival mode: Unlike the co-op game mode this game is based on, I had so much fun playing survival. Most of my hours are in this actually. The first time I was too stubborn to read what to do. Thought it couldn’t be that different, right. All survival mode spawn monsters, and you need to… survive? Nope, wrong. I was standing there for 20 minutes, thinking, “goddamn, this is boring.” With only a small amount of monsters, which I could defeat without getting hit once, it seemed very simple. But then I found out how to do it. And it is so much fun! Yes, there will be monsters spawning, but you need to move. Even though you see very little because of a snowstorm, you will need to find your way around. The main thing you need to find is the elite monsters. They are triple the size of normal monsters, so it’s not very hard. And these are fun to fight! There are different elites, and they all have other skills, which makes it very entertaining. You need to kill 10 of these elites that drop a stone. And with those stones, you open a portal and win the game. I haven’t gotten that far yet, but that doesn’t mean I didn’t have fun, cause hell yes, I did! I think this is the best game mode for me personally in this game. 

Somewhere between

• Story/voice-over: Usually, I listen to all the stories in a game. I might even read it all if it’s not voiced. But in this game, the voice-over sounded so bad, in my opinion. It sounded like the good sir that was speaking was trying so hard to put up a deep voice. And I feel like he didn’t put enough emotion into it. I found myself spamming that spacebar like no tomorrow just ’cause he sounded like that. So this is one of the first games that I don’t know anything about the story. I’ve read my character story, though, and found that good. I just couldn’t listen to the voice-over.

What we disliked

• Bots: The idea of having a game where one of your friends can be the boss you are fighting sounds so much fun. Only imagining the banter going around and the taunting brings joy to me. I’m just sad to say that this is not the case for this game yet. IF you have four friends willing to play with you, this might be the case. But if you go in solo, you’ll get to see that there aren’t many people playing this game at the moment. At least you won’t get a lot of actual players with you. You’ll get bots. And if the bots were good, it wouldn’t be that bad. But most of the time, they do 1/3rd of my damage. They don’t focus on what you want them to focus on. They might as well have a little picnic on the edge of the map. I don’t know how you get so little damage while not hitting the adds or the healing pillars. I was not too fond of this. When I’m playing LoL, I  have enough people ruining the game for me. I thought this was different. PLEASE make the bots better, because they suck!
• Survival map: As mentioned above, I loved this game mode. The map, however, I did not like. It’s completely covered in snow with a storm going on around you. It’s all snow and every now and then, a rock or a stone shaped monster, but there is nothing to it really. It’s empty and I love colors. There are none. It’s one big white battlefield. There is also no music. In other games (like my review of Griefhelm), this is not an issue. But adding a stale looking map to this made it boring to both the eyes and ears. I think the gameplay should always stand first in a game, but this did bother me. I put on my music or found myself distracted by other things even though the gameplay was fun. I think they should add intense music as soon as you get close to an elite. And maybe some casual music when you are at the start that gets more intense the more elites you have killed. I want an other map without snow, but I think this is part of the lore. So I understand their choice even though I can’t entirely agree with it.