Introduction
Hey folks Duncan here again with another review for you! This time we’ve got Stuffed, which I thought was quite an interesting game and you’ll see why as a go through it for you.
Have you ever wondered what your favourite childhood teddy bear got up to at night? Well now you might be able to find out!
Stuffed is a horde mode style game, think the original or early versions of Call of Duty Zombies, where you play as a teddy bear protecting their child from waves of nightmares ranging from various toys such as robots, rubber ducks and gnomes all the way up to shadow monster type bosses.
It certainly an interesting take on surviving wave after wave of enemies and let’s our inner child’s imagination run wild a little bit in a wholesome fun way. The developers Waving Bear Studios have a game here that can be very fun at times and scratches the nostalgia itch of the early Call of Duty Zombies that I personally miss sometimes.
Plot
Stuffed doesn’t really have a plot, your one and only mission is to protect your human against waves of enemies, nice and straight forward! It’s pretty much straight into the action too, with no real cutscenes or world to build so you are pretty much straight into the game. The simplicity of the game doesn’t necessarily detract from the game in fairness. Being able to drop straight into the game can be great, if you want to jump on quickly and seee how many waves of enemies you can beat before they knock they door down. It’s straight-forward to, all you need to know is kill as many enemies as possible, so there’s that!
Gameplay and Mechanics
Similarly with Call of Duty’s Zombie mode there are lots of things around the procedurally generated map that you can use to your advantage when taking on the waves of enemies. With weapons purchases and doors to open, any fan of the previously mentioned Zombie’s mode will be able to pick this up and develop strategies quickly. There are also teleport boxes that can be used to get you out of a jam, for when you accidently back yourself into a corner (which I have a bad habit of doing when I play these sorts of games-whoops!).
The “homemade” weapons and the microwave bags of popcorn that act as grenades are interesting and quite varied, some of which can do damage to you if you use them too close (again another one of my bad habits, I got the achievement of killing myself with a grenade in my first game). Being able to wipe out loads of enemies with the cola gun was quite satisfying as were a couple of the other weapons, surprisingly!
Opening doors can give you lots of space to work with on each map, which are never the same and works as you remember it would do from other wave-based modes and games, you must have enough points to open each area or buy guns, ammo, and bedroom door repairs.
I played this on the Xbox Series X (it’s also available on Steam) and it worked really well, I didn’t feel like the gameplay was too clunky and was straightforward to get into and get a good feel for the game from early on. Combat felt pretty good too and trying to make the most of the map and the new areas you could open made it interesting to play as well.
Although this game would be great for co-op or multiplayer, it isn’t available on the Xbox (it is available on Steam) which I was slightly disappointed with to be honest. It would have been great to play in a team of four players. It would have made thing a lot easier too as the difficulty started to ramp up for sure!
Overall, I would say it was quite a satisfying experience playing Stuffed with a good amount of challenging waves and a boss wave every tenth wave, after which you transition to the next night of continuing protecting your human. Stuffed is great fun and has a good sense of humour to it as well, it would certainly be great to play with friends, to make some of the larger waves and bosses a bit more manageable and to have a laugh with.
Graphics and Audio
Graphically Stuffed won’t break on to any of your “most beautiful games” list but that really isn’t important to be honest it looks good enough and it runs well enough that it won’t spoil anyone’s fun while playing. There was the odd moment of getting stuck on corners of things like stair bannisters but thankfully these were few and far between. In fairness, graphically Stuffed did run reasonably well I didn’t experience any bugs or glitches or have an issues with falling through the map and everything was easy to read and understand when you went to interact with something so it is far from the worst thing to look at!
I thought the audio did add a fair amount to the game, it was the right amount of creepy and did a reasonably good job of ratcheting up the tension as you made your way through the waves of nightmares. In fact I think it might be the best thing about the game! the music certainly put me on edge at several points during my repeated playthroughs, almost as much, if not more than the waves of enemies tryin to take me and Ellie’s bedroom door down!
Options and Accessibility
The options and accessibility for controls, audio and gameplay are standard, things like sensitivity controls, inverting the Y axis things like that. It would be interesting to see if this game could be played on Xbox’s adaptive controller and how it would be incorporated. Everything available in the game to change was standard really so there’s not an awful lot to say about it really.
Final Thoughts
Overall, I thought this was a fun game to play and an interesting take on the kind of horde mode style of games, taking on waves of enemies in different guises from what you normally see in similar games. It’s one disappointment for me was the lack of co-op on the Xbox version, playing this with friends would have been great fun, so I feel slightly jealous of the Steam players who get to experience it. Stuffed was still great fun to play solo in fairness and it does well as a solo player game, though there were the odd moment it would have been nice to have a team mate or two for support and to have a bit of banter with.
I felt that it was challenging and engaging enough to have a reasonably good amount of replay value and it would certainly be fun to dip in and out of every so often.
Well that’s all folks thanks for reading this review of Stuffed I hope you enjoyed it! I thought it was a reasonably decent game all told!
Stuffed is available on Steam and Xbox
Gamerhub Rating: 4 (out of 5) Joysticks
(Thank you to Keymailer, Waving Bear Studio and TheGamePublisher.com for providing the code for the review)
