Woodle Tree 2: Deluxe+ (PS4)

A sequel isn’t just a chance to provide more of a well-liked product, it can also be an opportunity to fix the flaws of an older title. Woodle Tree Adventures is certainly a cute and breezy little 3D platformer, but its generic gameplay and glitchy camera prevents the player from properly enjoying the mild amount of content on offer. Woodle Tree 2: Deluxe+ expands the gameplay and is able to handle its camera much better, and as the Deluxe+ in its name implies, it’s even had a go at refining its own designs after an initial release. This sequel is undoubtedly an improvement over the original, but an ambitious new push into an open world design means some of the lessons it learned from the first game don’t apply in this virgin territory.

 

The double-edged sword of expanded ambition becomes pretty clear as you take control of the game’s main character Woodle. The little tree trunk is on a new adventure, this time the plot renaming the Fairy Tears to the less random Water Tears and having their collection tied to reviving the petrified sages of the wood. A group of dark creatures have stolen the tears and are threatening to claim the entire world with their pulsing black gunk, so Woodle heads off with only a leaf to save the Wood Lands. The leaf is our clear improvement over the original, its uses expanding just enough to add to the platforming without becoming overcomplicated. If held overhead, Woodle can glide through the air, allowing him to clear larger gaps and better explore the wide world. If he’s on the ground and holds it over his head though, he can instead collect water in it, a few areas in the game requiring you to avoid trouble as you deliver it to a plant you need to grow.

 

You can still swing the leaf around as a weapon and now hold down the attack button to launch wind balls at far away switches and enemies, but the combat is just as shallow as ever. Most of the enemies you need to fight in Woodle Tree 2: Deluxe+ are bumbling creatures who pose little threat, and while a few will run towards you, even the shadow creatures as large as mountains barely put up a fight and just require constant leaf whacks to put down with ease. The final boss is barely a fight and many areas with enemy hazards can be easily jumped over or even walked around due to the open level design making trouble easy to avoid, but some foes like the pufferfish who leap out of the water and bees who buzz between platforms are actually dangerous, partially because you can’t really eliminate them. Besides a few cases where you have to defeat the right enemies to make a forcefield around a Water Tear disappear though, the fights are negligible enough that it’s hard to say they’re bad when they’re clearly not a main focus. However, any platformer is inevitably going to focus on the jumping, and that’s where we find the more harmful side of our double-edged blade.

A platformer lives and dies based on the responsiveness and reliability of its jumping. At first, Woodle might seem like he’s perfectly able to handle the Wood Lands with his modest abilities. A double jump gives you some extra control on top of your glide, and wall jumps let you traverse specially designed areas. However, the longer you play, the more you might realize your controls are getting less and less responsive. Soon you’ll be running towards an edge and pressing jump only for Woodle not to respond, and since Woodle Tree 2: Deluxe+ has not only tall vertical climbs but long drops back to earlier areas as your punishment for missing a jumping, a single instance of the game not reading an input can be incredibly frustrating. While the cute polymer clay style of the game’s world certainly suggest a low pressure platformer, when the game stops listening to you, even basic movement starts to become tedious and potentially aggravating. Resetting the game cleared up the problems briefly, but in less than an hour they returned, and any play session of even a modest length can run into these, especially since they seem to become more frequent the more you explore the open world.

 

This isn’t the only glitch possible in Woodle Tree 2: Deluxe+ either, as sometimes when I teleported back to the starting village, the entire world disappeared. All the objects were still floating in a void, but when I stepped out where the ground used to be I fell down into the abyss until I died. It took a few repeated teleports to fix things, but even after playing through the game I’m still unsure how much music is meant to be playing during the experience. Sometimes the soundtrack would show up with light backing tracks only for long periods of empty air to follow. It’s possible I was missing audio triggers, but the open world design makes it pretty easy to miss intended paths entirely.

 

After a starting area introduces you to the game, you are free to tackle the different sections of the world as you please. These are split off into different biomes such as a tall climb up a cliff, a snowy mountain, a flat open area segmented into four seasons, and some islands off the coast. It’s clear Woodle Tree 2: Deluxe+ finds more comfort in vertical design, its taller levels having more diverse platforming challenges and more control over where the character can move, but Woodle can work his way around a lot of them with just a decent mix of regular jumps, wall jumps, and the glide. It’s fairly easy to skip the long way around an area without having to put in much effort, and gliding can often carry you past large swathes of intended obstacles. Some places use wind to try and push you away from cheesing them with the glide, but even the canyon and islands that use the wind most can be easily passed over with enough height.

There are still decent platforming challenges to be found here and there, especially in the optional dream areas where precision platforming in restricted areas gets to shine so long as your controls are cooperating. However, the open world design is an incredibly mixed bag, some areas being packed with far too many inconsequential platforms and enemies and other spaces being practically barren. There are many stretches of the world map that are basically just filler until you reach one of the biomes with their water tears, and even in those areas there can be a lot of wasted space. Empty areas and spots where it’s all too easy to skip the objects laid out with no consequences for doing so are pretty common, and oddly enough, the game does have plenty of options for potentially adding more purpose to its large game world. Red berries are scattered around areas to give you something simple and quick to collect, and if you can collect enough you can start purchasing some upgrades and costumes for Woodle. Some like the triple jump even help you further get around the sparsely populated world and ignore even more of it, but there are a few things like the rarer blue berries and items for your home to find in areas that are slightly more difficult to reach.

 

Collecting or finding the berries and decorations does give some life to otherwise barren areas, but none of the collectibles are placed around liberally enough to really motivate you to explore, especially since sometimes your reward for solving a small puzzle or doing some tight platforming might just be a handful of red berries despite them being so easy to find elsewhere. Some areas are chock full of the red berries while many empty areas will be oddly subdued in placing them, giving almost no incentive to go check out that area. There may be a blue berry or two over there, but scouring a bland open area rarely pays off since so much of the environment is merely there rather than providing something to reward a curious explorer. There are paths and arrows to try and make sure you can find your way to required areas such as where Water Tears are kept, but even if you aren’t feeling all that adventurous, the required platforming can end up just as forgettable save for setpieces like a volcano and water slide that are mostly just visually interesting rather than an engaging gameplay complication.

THE VERDICT: Even though its title indicates that Woodle Tree 2: Deluxe+ had multiple chances to learn from past mistakes, it still manages to miss the mark overall. The platforming can be decent or challenging at times, yes, but the glitches that impact the controls can completely undermine them. The open world design offers some varied areas, but so many of them are barren or have their trials overcome by simply going around them. Collectibles are too spread out to motivate exploration, and even the intended path through the game doesn’t really craft the most exciting challenges to motivate continued play. It’s a large, empty world Woodle needs to explore, and its cute charm can’t make up for how bland most of its platforming ends up being.

 

And so, I give Woodle Tree 2: Deluxe+ for PlayStation 4…

A BAD rating. I love me a story of a redemption, but Woodle Tree can’t be said to have reached that point yet. Woodle Tree 2: Deluxe+ is an improvement over the original in many ways and the dream challenges show the series has a better understanding of what makes a platforming challenge thrilling, but the main game here is far too focused on its open world design and that new style of platforming isn’t done properly. The glitches impacting the jumps is enough to already almost doom the title, but if we look past the technical problems and only at the actual geometry of the world and the layout of its challenges, we find the player is given far too much freedom to explore far too little. Optional areas are barren and the main areas give you too many easy ways to get past challenges that aren’t even that substantial if engaged with properly. The different biomes and the moments where you are forced into engaging with the level design properly can have some fun moments, but most of the game world feels like things were placed with little thought and putting in the effort to go to them isn’t always properly rewarded. Rather than ensuring the foundation was fine after repairing the problems of the first Woodle Tree game, a new style of play was embraced and now has its own issues replacing the predecessor’s weak points.

 

Woodle is a cute character and his world continues to be bright and inviting, but actually playing in it continues to be a lopsided affair where generic design and actual technical flaws prevent the meager offerings from being more than passable at best. A game that needed more focus instead broadened it to the point it can’t even show off the lessons learned from last time, and while it can have its moments because of small refinements, it still can’t be the simple and fun 3D platforming game it clearly aspires to be.