Developed by Pyramid Games and published by Ultimate Games S.A., Castle Renovator is a medieval renovation game where you explore different medieval settings, renovate them, and then create and develop your very own settlement as well. Over time, Ultimate Games has released a lot of renovation and simulation games, and Castle Renovator is yet another renovation title from their studios. The game was recently released on Xbox consoles, and this review goes over the newest release of the title. This is our review of the Xbox version of Castle Renovator, in which we renovate a trebuchet and repair a 16th-century battleship to its former glory.
Castle Renovator is set in the middle of the 16th and 17th centuries, so you will notice a lot of Medieval architecture when it comes to buildings and settlements that you will get to explore in the game. While originally, you are tasked with creating your very own settlement, to acquire the required resources and gold, you will take on various jobs and complete them. These jobs will reward you with different amounts of gold and resources such as wood, which you can then use to create your very own settlement. You have a small piece of land where you can start building your own settlement, and as you build and expand it into a full castle with its surroundings, you can give out places for rent and invite more people to live inside your settlement as well. This shows that Castle Renovator is not just a game where you renovate old castles to their former glory, but has a lot more depth to it.
While your own land remains pretty much the same and it takes the shape of what you build on it, taking on different quests allows you to explore different beautiful medieval locations and complete various tasks such as renovating a castle after a battle, rebuilding trebuchets, and even maintaining large battleships. All of these quests have a minimum number of tasks that you must complete in order to complete the job, but if you are looking for additional bonuses, you can complete the quest fully and aim for an additional sum over what was promised for completing the job. You have a task counter on the left side of the screen that shows what needs to be done in order to renovate the location. The usual tasks include collecting all of the garbage, rebuilding walls and floors with wood or stone, and making sure that all of the stains are gone at the end. Sometimes there are location-specific tasks, but they might look different, but the base gameplay is pretty much the same.
After completing a quest, you come back to your own land and invest the gold and resources from the tasks into your own private land. You start by creating houses, and then you furnish them with different items and change the look of the house. Castle Renovator comes with a fairly decent selection of furniture and decorations for the houses in your settlement. You can decorate them with basic furniture such as beds, tables, closets, and paintings, and if you want to go a step further, you can purchase and place some really cool things as well, such as chandeliers, fireplaces, trees, pathways, and much more. You can even adopt some farm animals if you want, after creating their enclosures. The options are a lot, and you can customize your land to your will. If you run out of resources or gold, you can head back to some quests and earn more in order to further invest them into your land.
The gameplay of the Xbox release is tailored for a console experience, as all of the tasks are now assigned to different keys. You move around with the left joystick and look around with the right joystick. For accessing different tools in your inventory, such as the lighter, broom, or hammer, you press and hold the LB button, which opens the tool wheel for you. From here, you can select the tool you need with the right joystick. In your own land, you press RB to open the item menu from where you can view different furniture and construction options for your land. Different categories are all detailed here, and you have to use the left joystick to move between them. The left joystick is always assigned to your quick bar at the bottom of the screen, where you can assign new items as well by pressing the Y key while you are browsing the RB menu. If you want to put down anything, you will use the RT key, and most of the tasks in the game, such as cleaning and using tools, are also done by pressing the RT key.
Another major issue with the gameplay is repetition because, after a few hours, the gameplay tends to become repetitive. With the scenery changing for every quest, the tasks remain pretty much the same all the time. You might be heading to a castle or a ship for a job, but ultimately, you will be picking up garbage, collecting wood thrown on the ground, using the wood to fix some small holes, and then scrubbing off stains from the walls or the floor. The tasks repeat themselves in nearly all of the quests of the game, and because of this, the gameplay becomes tedious and repetitive after a few hours. While the locations are pretty cool and unique, sadly, the tasks tend to remain the same in them, which makes the game lose its value after some time.
Coming to the technical bit of Castle Renovator, not only does the game look subpar on the console, but the game also suffers from a lot of technical issues. Starting with the visuals, the game looks exceptionally dark even during the daytime. The lighting is pretty low overall, and this causes the environment to look a little too dark. This is mostly visible on the walls that are not facing the sun, and these are always looking like it’s nighttime in the game. This is fairly disappointing because even the base Xbox One is a pretty strong device, and having such visuals is simply not justified enough for a game in 2022. Apart from the poor visuals, the controls are pretty clunky as well and you will often find yourself falling down the stairs just because your character moved to the right or left suddenly while moving forward. The technical issues range from your character getting stuck in random locations to object placements that sometimes disappear on their own.
Most of these issues can easily be fixed with future updates, and something that should not be too hard to fix as well. The Xbox release of Castle Renovator has been out for quite some time now, and I think it is way overdue for a performance patch for the title. Releasing a game on a platform and then just leaving it hanging there with all of the issues and problems is not a good sign, and I hope that Pyramid Games and Ultimate Games resolve these issues soon. I have played tons of titles released by Ultimate Games, and I know that the publisher has some solid titles under their belt, so leaving a title with potential hanging in the middle does not send a good message to the fans of the publisher.
There are some enjoyable elements in the mix, and the game does offer a pretty decent selection of customization that you can do with your own land, including construction, maintenance, and beautification. Some of the quests are quite fun in the game as well, such as the ones that require you to build a trebuchet and the ones where you have to break someone’s house in order to get back at them. The repetition does eventually become a major issue with the game since the tasks are quite familiar, but then again, this is a game about renovation and building, so it is quite hard to avoid repetition in such a title.
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Final Verdict:
The main problem with Castle Renovator, apart from the technical issues, is the game has very little to do with actual castles. You will establish your own kingdom, but the structures are mostly just houses and random rooms. Very few quests are actually inside castles as well so the name of the game might be a little deceiving. The only thing this game has in common with castles is the medievil setting of the game. Apart from this, the game is currently plagued with tons of performance and technical issues which should be patched with an update as soon as possible. There is a decent game lying under all these problems and issues so unless the developer decides to patch things up, Castle Renovator is just a mediocre game on the Xbox console. If you love simulation games in first-person which require you to perform various maintenance tasks and build your very own kingdom, Castle Renovator could be on your playlist however the game requires work in its current form.
Final Score: 7.5/10
