Stuffed – Review

Elli’s a little girl with an active imagination, so when she drifts off to sleep it’s up to hear trusty teddy bear to defend her bedroom door to stop any nightmares from creeping in to Ellie’s blissful slumber.
Take control of Ellie’s favourite bear, make it pink, blue, or purple and wearing a witches costume, then grab a selection fo DIY weapons to fight of hordes of toys as you strive to protect your owners peaceful night.

Set within Ellie’s dream land, the one consistent is Ellie’s bedroom door, throughout each night, you’ll need to protect the door at all costs, but as every dream is different, the house layout will change with each playthrough, there seems to be three main starting areas, which will give you access to a level-up station, ammo for your starter weapon, a self-revive item, a door repair hit and some bags of popcorn that double up as a great makeshift grenade.

With every toy you defeat, you’ll build up points which can be spent on the above items, to help clear the increasingly difficult waves, however from Wave 5, you’ll start to get the odd shadow creature, a mysterious tank-like figure that absorbs bullets like a sponge and always heads straight for Ellie’s door.

The first one’s easy enough to clear with a few bags of Boom Corn, but you’ll need to try and conserve your ammo, to make sure you’ve got the funds to unlock new doors scattered throughout the level.
each door gives you access to a new more powerful weapon, but equally adds another entry point for incoming enemies.
There’s a handful of available rooms which are procedurally generated and added into the game world, but the weapons you unlock will always be in the same order, meaning you’ll need to save up thousands of points as well as keeping on top of door health and ammo, to get those better weapons before the enemy waves become to strong.

Gameplay follows a simple FPS survival style, where you have a fairly useless jump and crouch, but your main commands will be movement on your left stick, shooting with right trigger and grenades with RB, you can also sprint, and swap weapons, but with a limited capacity, you’ll need to choose your favourite two weapons because you won’t have time to run around searching when you’re approaching the final waves of a night.

No matter how far you get (and initially, it does take some getting used to, so don’t expect to be passing the entire night on your first attempt, but good or bad, each run rewards you currency that can be spent in the wardrobe, to unlock new cosmetics for your bear and weapons.
Each weapon has a handful of colours to unlock, and the bear has various fur designs as well as costumers. These cosmetics do add a nice extra to work towards, but as it’s a first person game, you ultimately don’t feel much reward when you can’t see your hard earned costumes in-game.

There is a 4-player online co-op mode, however at the time of review, that’ sonly available on PC, so when added to Xbox, I imagine it’s going to add some extra longevity and added incentive to unlock some of the fancier cosmetics, but if you’re looking at “Stuffed” as a solely single player title, it’s fun for a few hours, but will struggle to fill your evenings consistently.
Graphically, there’s not too much to complain about, there’s certainly nothing screaming next-gen, but the game world is well designed, colourful and remains clear enough that you’re always able to spot your enemies.
One complaint is the amount of clipping and collision detection as enemies will often just walk through a box or the banister of the stairs, but otherwise it’s fairly easy to use the encironment to bottle neck persuing foes to help take them down without receiving too much damage.

Audio equally feels about right, there’s the soft pings and pongs you expect form toys scurrying around the floor, but there’s no stand out audio to caress your ear-drums and some weapon fire soon starts to sound a little too repetitive.

Expected to arrive at the impressive price of around the £10-£15 mark on the 20th December, Stuffed is a fun, frantic and rewardind survival shooter, only let down by the current lack of online co-op, knowing that’s already available on PC and expected soon on Xbox, it’s a game well worth picking up for FPS Horde/Survival fans, to get some practice before Online is added.

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