Row, Row, Row Your Boat… Once It’s Built – Eighty Eight Games – You Must Build A Boat

I am a huge fan of games that can waste a tonne of time without you noticing, as I feel they really wrap you into them. So imagine how much I was looking forward to You Must Build A Boat when I saw the premise was like a dungeon builder. Looks can sometimes be a bit deceiving though, as I feel I was very misled in what to expect.

The game comes off as a tap to play game, which are so overdone at this point, I was expecting I’d find a little bit of fun, but the overall would feel boring and stale. I was completely wrong as to what I should have expected. You Must Build A Boat is actually a dungeon crawl game with a puzzle based underlay.

The puzzle is a standard match three puzzle, but instead of a gem swap it is a drag and match, meaning you can move a whole row or column to try to make at least three in a row. You can match weapons to damage (Sword and Magic Staff), match the shield to gain a shield, match keys to help unlock chests, and match crates to possibly find items you can use inside the crate itself. Fairly straight forward, and in the beginning it was exciting and fun to see everything that could be done.

The music in the game is spot on for an 8-Bit style of game, and I absolutely love the soundtrack. The game play is alright, but not really anything original or that I haven’t seen before. The game play starts exciting, since you want to keep pushing forward and see all of the new characters you can unlock (who help on your ship by building weapons, researching, etc), but there is only one real downfall that cripples this game in my opinion.

You Must Build A Boat is devoid of any actual story in my opinion, and while they (kind of) throw one together in there, it is not one that keeps me interested in continuing the game. The game play does get a little stale as you are literally doing the same thing over and over again, getting similar results every time, and honestly the game was more about speed then it was about actual difficulty. The faster you could switch the blocks, the less accurate you had to be.

Now, I feel bad ranting on it a bit, so let me say this game is not all bad. Honestly it was fun to start, and I got some good game play out of it. It brought me back to the old 8-Bit days with our favourite sprites, and honestly excelled in a few ways. Don’t think this is the worst game I’ve played by far, but it also wouldn’t crack my top 100.

EDIT – After going back and replaying it again, I did actually find it was a bit more rewarding, and fun, then I had originally assumed. I have adjusted my score accordingly.