Poopdie – Chapter One

Genre: Top-Down Action-RPG

Players: 1

.

Review:

Poopdie, originally released to mobile devices in 2019 and brought to the Nintendo Switch in 2020, is a Top-Down Action-RPG that’s the answer to the question, “What would you get if you combined the visual themes of The Binding of Isaac, the game mechanics of Pikmin, and the sense of humor of YouTuber PewDiePie?” I’m… not really sure why you’re asking questions like this, but Poopdie is the answer to that question.

I don’t mention PewDiePie as a random reference, either. The world-famous YouTuber has clearly had a hand in the creation of this game, with his screen name mentioned in the game’s extended title, the game’s sense of humor very clearly in sync with PewDiePie’s lowbrow sensibilities, references to parts of his life like his dog and girlfriend, and PewDiePie himself narrates the game’s introduction. So if you’re one of those people who despises PewDiePie… well, you probably won’t like this game.

If you’ve lived under a rock for the last decade ago and haven’t been introduced to PewDiePie’s juvenile sense of humor… well, suffice it to say, this game is all about the poop and fart jokes. Sphincters and butts everywhere. For me personally, I will say that there’s something amusing about hearing this lowbrow stuff spoken in PewDiePie’s Swedish accent, and even when he’s not speaking, the tone of the game’s writing remains consistent enough with his style that I may have occasionally gotten a chuckle out of it here or there, but before long it does all become rather one-note.

As for the rest of the presentation, this game features a simple hand-drawn art style with a lot of gross-out humor, very similar to The Binding of Isaac. It’s not appealing, but then it’s not really supposed to be, and I suppose for the purposes of pushing the game’s humor it serves its purpose, although it does get visually repetitive before long.

As for the gameplay, players wander around dungeons with their poop-worm, eating objects you come across and spawning anthropomorphic poops to fight for you. These poops can be sent to target resources or enemies independently, much in the way players do in the Pikmin games, although players have access to so few of them that this game doesn’t really feel like a Real-Time Strategy game in the way the Pikmin games do. Still, even despite this limitation, it’s potentially promising to combine this mechanic with a Top-Down Action-RPG.

There are a few problems here, though. Firstly, the game is absolutely filled with resources to collect, and that makes it all the more frustrating that you’re so limited in the number of minions you can spawn at a given time. It makes collecting those resources seem a bit pointless. Why bother, when you can always backtrack and get more if you need it? It also doesn’t help that by default your minions are pretty slow and don’t do much damage in attacks, although these things can be upgraded over time.

However, the biggest flaw here has to be the way the game handles targeting. For whatever reason, the touchscreen controls of the mobile version of the game have been stripped away here, forcing players to use the more traditional control scheme. That wouldn’t be horrible in and of itself – the game has players targeting enemies and resources with a cursor controlled by the right stick, which works fine, when it actually works. The problem is that the cursor has a tendency to “lock on” to some things, making it very difficult to target other things nearby. In particular, if an enemy is sitting just behind a barrier, you’ll have a hell of a time targeting that barrier because the cursor will want to target the enemy instead. This is a frequent frustration in the game, and it’s further exacerbated by the cursor’s strange behavior – sometimes it disappears outright, and sometimes it seems to automatically relocate to some random position.

Between the slow pacing, players’ limited capabilities, repetitive humor and visuals, and a horribly unreliable central game mechanic, it’s hard to recommend Poopdie to anyone but diehard PewDiePie fans. It’s a shame too, because this is a game that does combine some unique gameplay with an appealing sense of humor (though of course, to each their own), but it feels like every part of this game is flawed in some way that makes it hard to appreciate any of these good qualities.

tl;dr – Poopdie is a Top-Down Action-RPG that combines PewDiePie’s style of humor with Binding of Isaac’s fixation on bathroom humor, tossing in a Pikmin-esque minion-controlling mechanic. Unfortunately, while this game is trying a lot of interesting things, pretty much every one of them is flawed, with repetitive environments and humor, slow pacing, and a targeting mechanic that’s outright broken. Fans of PewDiePie may still get a kick out of this game, but most are better off skipping it.

Grade: C-

^{You can support eShopperReviews on Patreon! Please click HERE to become a Sponsor!}