Overgrowth Critic Reviews

Overgrowth is, first and foremost, a singular experience. A game that brings something really unique, presenting an adventure that, even with multiple flaws, has an amusing combat system, great aesthetics and smooth platforming. Weird as many, fun as few.

It’s an experience which I can’t adequately compare to anything else on the market, and yet it’s so grounded in mod-development culture that its graphics, controls and gameplay feel comforting and familiar. It’s a triumph of valuable development keystones which support each other, making it a game far greater than the sum of its parts – I certainly couldn’t put it down, and so I can’t recommend it enough.

In the end Overgrowth remains what it appeared to be through all those years of development: a curio. It's is a weird, unique creation, a window into a world with an alternate approach to beat 'em ups. A strange and beautiful place to visit, it just doesn't feel substantial enough to make a home in. It's a game to blast through in a weekend, enjoy, and then never really think about again.

A visceral, brutal fighting game with no subtlety and no ambition for it. Long loading times and a poor camera don’t detract massively from the animalistic fun Overgrowth provides.

Nine years is a long time to be working on a project, but what Wolfire Games was able to do in developing their own physics and graphics tech is pretty cool. Overgrowth is fun and challenging (sometimes brutally so) and it held my attention for quite some time… which takes some doing! If you like games with rag-doll physics and a beat’em up style, Overgrowth is for you! A word of caution though, it can get a wee bit bloody.

While Overgrowth‘s interesting ideas are let down by wonky fighting and parkour mechanics, there’s still a lot to love here. The world looks great, there’s a huge amount of variety in the locations that Turner visits, and the developers have a great eye for game architecture, building some truly impressive edifices for Turner to scale. If the controls were tighter this would be an incredible game, but instead it’s only an incredibly ambitious one that doesn’t reach its goals.

Here's hoping Overgrowth may still yet become something special in the long run. But, as of right now, after all these years, the game was only interesting for me for a few hours and felt like more of a fun novelty, or a tech demo, than an actual video game. While the gameplay and mechanics here are solid and the physics engine is impressive, the campaign on the other hand is extremely disjointed, short, and uninteresting in terms of presentation. By the time I had completed both campaigns, twice over, it just left me wishing they made better use of it all.

Overgrowth feels a bit too empty. It has all the pieces to be a great martial-arts, parkour, bonanza, yet the buggy controls, repetitive fights, and short campaigns all let it down.

The combat of Overgrowth is exhilaratingly fun with everything's working as it should, but that’s not very often. You also have to get used to the wonky and weird way it interprets both combat strikes and landings. It's a shame that everything else about Overgrowth, whether it's the story, the level design, or even the physics system, feels undercooked. It's not hard to find some fun here, but it's fun you'll soon forget.

After nine years of development, Overgrowth finally arrive at its final version, but the action melee games needs some very improvements.

Overgrowth, while fun for a while, misses the mark for a captivating story or combat. The world feels uninviting and dead, giving off the feel of a game from the early 2000’s when the processing power of hardware was much more limiting. The combat is fast-paced and fun, but it lacks depth and eventually goes stale. The story that ties it all together feels loose and lacks impact, each character blends into another and consequently prevents the player from connecting at a deeper level. The title does shine for the first hour or two, but it quickly loses its flair.

Despite its long development time Overgrowth comes riddled with technical issues which detract from the mild enjoyment it provides.

​Ten years of development and Overgrowth is still a mess.​

Overgrowth's opaque combat, off-putting presentation, and unremarkable ideas would have made it a mediocre game ten years ago. Today, they make it a bad one.

Overgrowth feels like a mod created for a wacky physics sandbox where all the openness and experimentation has been pushed to the side, and everything else has been twisted around a forgettable, barely present story and a series of brief and ugly levels. I’m just glad that, at around two to three hours long, it’s incredibly short.