Dragon Quest Builders for Nintendo Switch review: Rebuilding the world

Dragon Quest Builders manages to be an engrossing crafting game that can eat up days if not weeks of your life, but not without a couple major issues.

Developer: Square Enix
Publisher: Square Enix
Platforms: Nintendo Switch (version reviewed), PS4, Vita
Release Date: February 9th, 2018 (Nintendo Switch)

There exist some gigantic gaming phenomenon I have never gotten into and likely never will. Key among these is the insanely popular game Minecraft. I have never played the game, despite it being available in some form on every platform I own. It’s not that I wouldn’t like to try to get into it, but the lack of any clear goal and seemingly immense, possibly never-ending timesink seem far too intimidating for me and many others.

So what might attract me to a game like Minecraft is something like it, but with a little more direction and given an aesthetic that seems a bit more welcoming. That’s more or less what Dragon Quest Builders proposes to be. It offers you the chance to build a city, but gives you directives on how to go about doing so. You are free to build pretty much how you like, but to actually advance in the game, there’s usually a clear goal to meet.

Seeing how Dragon Quest Builders has been out since 2016, this won’t be a deep-dive review, rather a review of how well it performs on the Nintendo Switch with a few general observations of the roughly 20 hours I have spent with the game thus far. The basic setup is that the world has fallen to evil and everyone has forgotten how to make things. You have this now sacred ability and must use it to restore the world and ultimately defeat the evil plaguing the land.

More from Reviews

• Sonic Dream Team review: A welcome surprise to Apple Arcade
• Nacon’s Revolution 5 Pro for Playstation: Is it worth it?
• Jusant review: An uplifting tale about lifting yourself up
• WarioWare: Move It review: A waggle in the right direction for the series
• Alan Wake 2 review: Am I high right now?

As far as performance, Dragon Quest Builders runs incredibly well on the Nintendo Switch. There was some occasional slowdown and frame issues playing undocked, but these issues were minor and never interfered with gameplay. Moreover, The Switch seems like a fairly ideal way to play this type of game. The day/night cycle it has is fairly short and while I found it’s loop of gathering resources, crafting and building to be satisfying for short rounds of play, longer sessions (anything topping two hours) did feel rather dull and redundant. In essence, it’s a game you want to really take your time with rather than spend 50 hours in a few days on.

Dragon Quest Builders is split up into four chapters. Each chapter contains a new city to rebuild with its own different sets of resources and people to populate your city with and monsters to fight. After a chapter is done, you move on to the next, but with nothing except the recipes for crafting things you have already learned. Any equipment, resources, or even hit points you have gained are completely gone. It is such a drastic drop from where you are at it’s hard to get motivated to start up again. Having to build another town from scratch makes sense, having to completely rebuild my character again really doesn’t.

There’s a great sense of exploration and wonder to the game…

This wouldn’t be so daunting a prospect if not for Dragon Quest Builders most glaring flaw: its combat. Gathering resources by chopping down stuff, breaking up minerals, etc. is incredibly fun. But there are monsters roaming these lands, and some you have to fight to get certain resources. Some are just incredibly aggressive and will chase you for quite awhile if you try to just run away. And the combat is insultingly basic and terrible. You have no defensive maneuvers, you simply have to try to clumsily move out of the way of attacks. Most battles being a question of if your armor is strong enough/do you have enough healing items, rather than combat skill. You cannot make long-distance weapons, but many enemies can fire projectiles, off-screen, resulting in many, many cheap hits and occasionally deaths.

To add to this problem, hit detection with weapons is abysmal; where it seems like you should definitely be hitting an enemy, you sometimes miss anyway. On top of this, merely touching an enemy damages you so you’ll suffer plenty of damage merely trying to get close enough to actually hit your enemy without them doing anything.

Additionally, while Dragon Quest Builders offers an overhead map of your area, it’s strangely limited. You can get a bird’s eye view of where you are, and stretch out in each direction a little bit from there, but that’s it. I can’t even set markers for places I want to check out. It’s fun to explore the areas in the game and find cool stuff, it should be just a little easier to do.

Despite this, Dragon Quest Builders has several strengths that greatly help overcome the poor combat. There’s a great sense of exploration and wonder to the game, from discovering optional town residents to finding hidden treasure if you look/dig around enough. Each townsperson is also a treat, with distinct personalities and great design and it’s always fun to see them running around just doing their thing in town and talk them and get their opinions on other town members even if they don’t have a quest for you. The fairly constant loop of gathering resources, crafting base materials and bulding your city remains consistently satisfying through many hours of play as well.

More app trigger: Best Nintendo Switch games out right now

Dragon Quest Builders comes to the Switch and like a lot of ports to Nintendo’s new console seems like a pretty ideal way of playing the game. I have a lot of issues with the combat, but the charming aesthetic, the appeal of the game’s loop of resource gathering, crafting and building along with the fun characters you meet that will inhabit your towns keeps me playing.

A copy of this game was provided to App Trigger for the purpose of this review. All scores are ranked out of 10, with .5 increments. Click here to learn more about our Review Policy.