Woolfe: The Red Hood Diaries (PC) Review

Fairy mediocre tale.

Visual fidelity is, in actuality, a double edged blade.

When a game looks impressive enough to the point it could be mistaken for a high-budgeted title, we can’t help but expect the rest of the package to be on par with the visuals.

I mean, if it looks like a chicken, right?

However, when the gameplay and overall polish of the game falls short of expectations, I can’t help but feel that too much of the budget and time was spent on the visuals alone, leaving the overall experience feeling rushed and hollow.

Such is the case with Woolfe – The Red Hood Diaries.

The visuals in Woolfe reminded me of the Trine series, which is high praise indeed.
MSRP: $9.99
Platforms: PC
Demo Availability: N/A
Length: 1-2 hours

The story of Woolfe is yet another retelling of the classic fairy tale of the Red Riding Hood and the Big Bad Wolf.

It’s a tale of revenge spun in the stylings of the well-known Grimm novels, but it lacks a certain creative zeal and psychological drama to be truly called as such.

In the end, it’s a rather straight-forward tale that ends as quickly as it began, as it only took me just a little over an hour and a half to complete.

In fact, it ends so abruptly that I actually had to look up whether this was an episodic game, but it turns out that while they seem to be working on a sequel this is all they have to offer for the price of admission.

While most other players/reviewers would take offense to the length of this game I do not, as I find that it’s the enjoyment of the experience itself that matters and not the duration, but in that regard I do have my share of complaints.

All the moves unlock naturally as the game progresses, but they don’t add much depth to the combat.

There’s no nice way to say this- the combat in Woolfe is awful.

There’s only a light and heavy attack to use, and while a few moves are added to the roster that use up a special meter, they are entirely unnecessary as they are uninteresting to use.

The one and only weapon in the whole game was a simple axe and it was clunky to wield, lacking any semblance of weight or fluidity.

There weren’t even simple combos to speak of, and I found myself just mashing on the light attack until everything around me was dead.

The platforming, which serves to be the other half of the game play, also felt rather dull, as the level design was fairly basic and there wasn’t a single puzzle in the entire game that required any sort of out-of-the box thinking.

The typical scenarios of moving platforms and excessive use of double jumping were the order of the day, and it’s too bad because it’s been done before countless times and better, to boot.

Lastly, I encountered numerous bugs in which the sound effects for my attacks wouldn’t come out and a boss encounter that glitched out, making it invincible and forcing a restart of the game to fix.

I’ll get to the bottom of the game developer’s obsession with the mandatory sewers level one day.

Woolfe is like a small present box wrapped up in lavishly vibrant paper and tied together with a silk ribbon. It’s just unfortunate that I opened the box to find a copy of the “Bouncer” for the PS2.

Fun Tidbit – Speaking of the Big Bad Wolf, this game had me wondering if TellTale was going to continue the excellent Wolf Among Us series.

Review copy of game provided by publisher.

Good
  • Beautiful steampunk aesthetics
  • A Grimm-like take on a popular fairy tale
Bad
  • Clunky combat
  • Numerous glitches
  • Abrupt ending
  • Uninteresting boss encounters
5.5
Mediocre
Written by
Jae has been a gamer ever since he got a Nintendo when he was just a child. He has a passion for games and enjoys writing. While he worries about the direction gaming as a medium might be headed, he's too busy playing games to do anything about it.