Growtopia

Genre: MMO / Platformer / Sandbox

Players: MMO

Game Company Bad Behavior Profile Page: UbiSoft

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Review:

WARNING: THIS GAME HEAVILY PUSHES MICROTRANSACTIONS

Growtopia is a bit difficult to describe. It’s sorta’ like an MMO, except with instanced “rooms”, it’s a 2D platformer with destructible and buildable scenery, kinda’ like a poor man’s 2D Minecraft or Terraria. And it’s free to download and play, with the game making its money through in-game currency that can be earned normally during the course of the game or purchased with real money.

Graphically, this game is pretty ugly. It looks like these guys just went with the first drafts of everything their art department came up with, and their art department was staffed by five year olds. But it’s free, so fine.

The controls in this game are odd. Nothing is mapped quite where you’d expect it to be, and you can’t re-map it, so at least at first you’re probably gonna’ take some time getting used to it. But it’s free, so fine.

Then you start your first little world, hoping to learn the ropes of how to do stuff as you get used to the game’s wonky controls. Okay, you can break apart and “grow” anything, and then place it to build. That’s cool. Oh, and already I’m being visited by someone! Interesting… uh oh.

So here’s the thing. People are assholes. I swear every single jerk that entered my world immediately started punching me, and then tearing apart everything I’d built. I only just started, am trying to get a feel for the game, and already I’m getting mugged. It’s not a fun experience.

Players can apparently buy “locks” to keep out other players, and holy shit are they necessary if you want even a moment’s peace and quiet to try and get a feel for the game… but they’re so expensive the only way to get them is… you guessed it, pony up the dough to get some.

So the game kinda’ works out to be a protection racket of sorts. Either you pay the folks behind the game to keep your work safe from the horrible hoodlums populating the game, or something bad might happen to you. Will. Will happen.

Ugh. Yeah, no. I can maybe understand if you have to deal with this crap after you’ve had a chance to learn the ins and outs of the game, but if you can’t even make it through the full tutorial without another player busting into your space to wreck your world, I just can’t see how anyone can enjoy this game without plunking down cash for a really sleazy scheme.

Do not bother downloading Growtopia. Yes, even though it’s “free”.

tl;dr – Growtopia is a MMO Platforming Sandbox. It’s also a terrible mess, and the game puts you at the mercy of horrible other players before you’ve even made it through the full tutorial, and then demands your money to stop it, like some sort of digital protection racket. Do not download this game.

Grade: F

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This game has been nominated for one or more of eShopperReviews 2019 Game Awards:

Winner:

Worst Microtransactions – There are games with nasty microtransactions, and then there’s Growtopia, which pushes the worst players in your face while you’re still trying to learn the game and charges you protection money to get them to stop harassing you. I’d be impressed with the gall if I wasn’t so enraged. While every one of the runners-up for this award did something particularly nasty to deserve being placed here (a crappy kid-friendly knockoff created just to sell microtransactions, a kid-friendly game that added post-launch microtransactions, and a game with lootboxes and wait mechanics), Growtopia is the one game that truly pushed the bar in finding a new way to extort players I hadn’t even heard of yet, and we’ll all be worse off if the rest of the industry tries to copy it.

Worst Game – I give a lot of leeway to free games when it comes to monetization. However, Growtopia’s monetization is ugly, offensive, and damn near abusive, and that’s on top of an ugly game that’s poorly cobbled-together in the first place. Do not download this game.

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