River Tails: Stronger Together is a platform cooperative game for two players with a colourful and playful atmosphere, developed by Kid Onion Studio and published by GRAVITY GAME ARISE.
Our protagonists will be a curious purple cat and an irreverent orange fish, whose precious green branch will be stolen and whom will attempt to reclaim it with the help of an unusual feline companion.
This content is provided by YouTube. To view it, you must allow external content. Activation may result in data being shared with the third party.
Jump, Jump, Run
The game is based on cooperation and timing. The odd couple on the hunt for the enemy to defeat must traverse levels in "corridors," jumping and swimming from platform to platform, solving simple logic puzzles along the way, all based on our ability to coordinate.
The gameplay, pad-friendly, is therefore extremely simple, beyond the directional inputs there will be a jump command and a grab command, and that’s it. Simplified controls that help a lot of casual players approaching the title, which therefore proves suitable for sharing with any friend of yours who isn’t particularly experienced with video games.
Simplification of controls that nevertheless won’t result in a flat gameplay, but rather River Tails is definitely a good platform with vibrant colours that, although not demanding a great deal of effort, excluding boss fights, will entertain with its cooperative pace.
It’s pointless to hide the elephant in the room: River Tails clearly draws inspiration from the most celebrated "It Takes Two" in several respects, from its simplified gameplay to its aim of bringing together people unfamiliar with video games. The main differences with its bigger competitor lie in a more intuitive gameplay and a story almost absent but more focused on allowing us to appreciate the cartoonish style of the natural landscapes.
Watchful and patient
For those with a sharper eye, it’s possible to find hidden among the volatile variopinti scattered across the levels — once reached, they unlock in your “den,” which you can access at the end of each chapter. In addition to locating their positions, you’ll usually need to solve slightly more complex puzzles and perform better-coordinated actions. Extra challenges the developers chose to include as secondary ones to avoid overwhelming new players with difficulty unsuitable for their current level.
River Tails is presented, in its early access, as cut off from a large part of its content: despite the mention of future team projects, we truly cannot know how much or in what way the extras they intend to add will function. We are not referring only to the next chapters, but also to a better organised "den", where we will be able to return with greater freedom, and various frills, such as cosmetic items, which, although we are encouraged to collect in-game coins to acquire them, are not yet present...
Falls and rebounds
We can’t overlook the various bugs, mainly caused by the poorly defined map boundaries that will send us, especially when searching for hidden birds, outside the game world, thus ending our guiltless demise. Other bugs we’ve frequently encountered include some "infinite falls" of our avatars suspended between two different terrains and camera angles that are frankly uncomfortable.
For the rest, the game runs very well and is mostly well optimised, with optimisation that strangely disappears in certain map areas where the view shifts laterally and FPS drop by nearly 100 units from the 120 consistent frames the game maintains for most of the time.
To the posterity, the hard verdict
River Tails is a great project for those looking for a good co-op title to enjoy with a friend or two who aren’t particularly into video games and prefer simple, colourful settings. However, the current state of the game doesn’t yet warrant recommending it. The product is still far from being fully defined, and you’re likely to encounter bugs and notice the absence of entire mechanics — even if secondary — that help make the game more enjoyable. We at KotaWorld reserve the right to wait for a more complete version before giving our final verdict.
