Tools Up! (Switch)
Back when I reviewed a game called Shakes on a Plane, I noted how the cooperative tasks focused on in the game ended up feeling a bit too much like the real job of a flight attendant despite the silly gimmicks they are adjacent to. Too many of the nuisances and the general monotony of the work seemed to shine through strongest, but while Tools Up! can also feel like work, it manages to hit on a different aspect of it. Rather than feeling like you’re being given chores, the home renovation featured in it manages to feel more like a job well done, that satisfaction of seeing your tasks complete in a visual way helping this game better nail the idea of a cooperative work game.
Tools Up!’s housework actually lines up pretty closely with the tasks you’d expect of someone trying to give their residence a makeover. While you don’t need to deal with aspects like furniture, you are put in charge of things like painting the walls, tiling the floors, and even demolishing or constructing walls. Every level has a small set of tasks laid out for you in the blueprint you’re able to pick up any time to read, and while you won’t be able to see what you need to do unless it’s open, there is a nice system in place to tell you if you’re doing the work properly. If you’re completing work in the right area of the house, your completion percentage will tick up slightly, and if you do something you aren’t meant to, it won’t impact the bar. This feature can be particularly helpful since sometimes the tiles, carpets, and paint you are delivered are similar in color or design, but the game always has a way to undo your slip-ups too so you won’t need to restart a level if you accidentally stray from the blueprints.
Starting a stage, whether you’re alone or with up to three other players, you’ll often not have every tool you need to complete your work. Over the course of the short stages deliveries will be made you need to grab, so while it is easy to start beavering away at renovating the house, there are things to pull you away from simply completing the tasks even in the simplest of stages. As the game progresses the complexity of certain tasks will increase, such as first needing to pull off the current wallpaper, then spackle the wall, and finally place the new wallpaper up before it dries, but all the steps are fairly easy to complete in isolation. Some houses are designed so that you might have to clean up a lot of trash or tear a lot of flooring up first before you get to work, but besides some areas cluttered with furniture it doesn’t really impede you for long. Your work is tied to one button while another helps you move objects around, but the cramped houses and small spread of buttons being relied on means it can be easy to accidentally perform the wrong task or struggle to line up perfectly to do the one you want. The walls and and floors do highlight when you’re about to work on them though so you at least have a clear indicator to work with there, but it’s not always clear if a room does need to have its wallpaper or flooring torn up from a glance. The game’s top down perspective makes it fairly easy to see most rooms though and you can rotate the level using the blueprint if something is hidden from sight.
The actual difficulty of your work usually just comes from doing it expediently. You and the other players need to make sure not to get in each other’s way, need to watch out so no paint is spilled, and keep track of the tasks so everyone is kept busy. Level timers are fairly generous if your group is well coordinated but they aren’t excessively forgiving either. If you lollygag or make too many mistakes without realizing it, you can end up not completing the level. In the game’s story mode that doesn’t really have any story at all, every room in a house you complete grants you points, these going towards a three star rating you get at the end of the level. Stars are necessary to unlock the later levels, so you need to make sure you complete the entire renovation in the time limit and clean up all your tools afterwards to get enough stars to finish the adventure. Besides the time limit potentially being reached, all you need to do is ensure all the work is done to get three stars, removing some of the pressure other cooperative work games like Overcooked! or Shakes on a Plane can place on the player to perform exceptionally well. This does make Tools Up! a fairly relaxing member of the genre, the pressure not too high and the tasks easy to get lost in despite not being too difficult.
However, the game taking it so easy on the player is where Tools Up! does run into some of its issues. The basic gameplay loop is a fine one that can be mildly satisfying, and with few frustrations save for perhaps uncooperative co-op partners, it’s a nice game to play to wind down or just chat over. There are some cute touches, the default workers being regular people but there are Halloween monsters and humanoid animals to play as well, but the meat of the game is where it comes up a little short. The gimmicks faced in Tools Up! aren’t very substantial. You might renovate a house where you’re slip-sliding around an icy rink to paint the walls in alternating colors, grabbing your deliveries from a little stream instead of deliverymen, or making sure not to step off a path into lava that will make you bounce around as you let the flames die out, but these level designs aren’t very common. Whereas that set of examples would usually be my way of showing some of the more creative concepts in a game that experiments with many, the factors that can complicate your work are few and far between in Tools Up!.
On one hand this can be nice as the ideas aren’t done to death; the level with the meddlesome dog who interferes with your work is designed around that hindrance but it could be irritating if it kept cropping up in level after level. However, some gimmicks like the thin bridges you walk across aren’t really too difficult to overcome or work around, and it feels like a lot more levels just focus on giving you a lot to do or introducing some new type of task to learn. The level with the false blueprints where you need to experiment to find the true one is a memorable and entertaining concept, but mostly the game fails to embrace the wackier ways the job can be complicated and it’s not as engaging as it could have been for it.
When you do finish the thirty levels of the main game though, you unlock Time Attack. Party Mode is unlocked from the start and is initially just a way to play the game’s levels quickly, although unlocking each stage for it in the story is necessary still. The focus in Party Mode is shifted to doing things quickly to get the best scores, but the reward system is not really there to urge you to do the best you can to three star stages. However, Time Attack has players earning themselves more time by completing tasks, losing time by failing at them, and trying to get within certain time windows to get the three star ratings. Like Party Mode it shifts the focus to more stringent criteria for success than the main adventure, but the best way to play Tools Up! probably exists somewhere between all three modes of play. The main story’s progress with the time windows of Party Mode would lead to something more energetic, and the time increases or decreases from Time Attack could help to incentivize careful play. Too much pressure and the game might lose some of its potential for a laidback group activity, but being too loose in what it expects from the players unfortunately means it is not living up to the full potential of its concept.
THE VERDICT: Tools Up! is a nice game to whip out when you and a group of friends want some low pressure cooperative play, but the mild satisfaction of a job well done can’t compete with what the game could have been. All of Tools Up!’s good ideas are spread too far apart, unique level gimmicks only cropping up sporadically between the more typical work stages. The main adventure, Party Mode, and Time Attack split up the concepts that could have lead to play being more exciting and delightfully chaotic if properly mixed together. There are some small issues with visual clarity, but mostly Tools Up! manages to be a casual cooperative work game that can entertain a group of friends a bit despite not having the interesting variables needed to make it incredibly engaging.
And so, I give Tools Up! for Nintendo Switch…
An OKAY rating. Despite having its better ideas a bit too separate, be they mode concepts or level gimmicks, the game doesn’t feel hollow or stretched thin for it. The rollout of different ideas across the thirty levels is consistent even if sometimes it is just teaching you a slightly different form of renovating rather than introducing some eye-catching gimmick like lava floors, so it doesn’t really stagnate despite the game not pushing players too hard. Party Mode and Time Attack do give ways to inject more life into the regular gameplay and tighten things a bit for increased challenge, but while going through the game once is a fine time, returning to it with things slightly harder isn’t enough of a divergence from regular play to motivate engaging with those extra options. I’ve already mentioned rolling together a lot more of the idea could do a lot to make Tools Up! a livelier experience that could push back against players in an interesting way, but more levels with interesting complications truly feels like the shot in the arm the game would need if it wants to be more than a casual way to spend time with gamer friends. The actual work of wallpapering, painting, tiling, and so on aren’t inherently challenging enough to carry the whole experience, so having a few more wild card ideas in play could help this game get by on more than simple charms and casual play.
Tools Up! isn’t going to lead to chaotic multiplayer sessions, but it also isn’t bogged down with irritating ideas or weak gimmickry. It’s riding a middle road where beating a level feels gratifying but the actual work to do so isn’t that tough, perhaps closer to the satisfaction of cleaning off your desk rather than remodeling your home. Tools Up! isn’t a game that needs renovating to entertain its players, but with the right coat of paint and set of features, it could have been much more than something slightly fun.