Riverbond

What do you get when you take a dungeon crawler and remove the spreadsheets, the skill trees and the hours of loot comparison? Toronto studio Cococucumber answers that with Riverbond, and the answer is modest on purpose.

Riverbond calls itself a “shoot-and-slash” action adventure. The core idea is simple: an evil Knight has imprisoned the leaders of the Eight Worlds, the land is falling into drought and disorder, and players go through eight hand-built voxel realms to fix it. Combat mixes twin-stick ranged fire and melee combos. The story exists to justify the trip, and the game never claims otherwise.

Its real focus is the room it’s played in. Riverbond is built around local co-op for up to four players on a single shared screen. That makes it a party game first and a dungeon crawler second. The common “Diablo meets Minecraft” description is half right. You get the Minecraft look and the isometric hack-and-slash framing, but Diablo’s long-term systems are mostly absent. In practice it sits closer to Castle Crashers: a drop-in brawler where the people next to you matter more than build planning.

Timing also matters. Riverbond launched on PC, Xbox and PlayStation in 2019 and reached Nintendo Switch in December 2019. A few months later Mojang released Minecraft Dungeons, a voxel action RPG from the owner of the blocky look itself, with online play and deeper loot. Riverbond got there first, and it now competes against that larger, better-funded game on looks alone.

The reception has been warm but small in scale. IGN called it “a fun and frantic co-op hack and slash,” and Nintendo Life called it “undemanding but pleasant.” Both are accurate, and the gap between those two phrases is where this review sits — closer to the second than the first.

• Fully destructible voxel environments: Almost every fence, crate, tree and wall breaks apart into showers of cubes. Destruction is the game’s main reward, and it works.
• Hybrid shoot-and-slash combat: Twin-stick ranged attacks combine with close-range melee, switchable freely against whimsical enemies.
• Up to four-player local co-op: Drop-in couch co-op on one screen. This is the game’s reason to exist.
• Eight hand-crafted worlds: Each realm has its own palette, theme and enemy set, and each ends with a confrontation tied to rescuing that world’s leader.
• Unlockable weapons and abilities: New weapons appear throughout the campaign, each changing the attack rhythm, alongside a large wardrobe of cosmetic character skins.
• NPC quest-givers: Riverbond’s voxel citizens hand out small side quests and directions that break up the combat.

The Shoot-and-Slash Loop

The combat is built to feel immediate. Melee hits are designed to land with weight, ranged attacks have a snappy rhythm, and the destructible scenery makes every swing productive even on a miss. Clearing a field of enemies also flattens the field, and that visible change is a better feedback system than many games get from damage numbers.

The problem appears after a while. Riverbond’s enemy roster asks for very little. Most fights come down to approach, mash, and dodge when it gets crowded. Ranged and melee attacks both exist, but the game rarely creates situations where choosing between them matters. There’s seldom an enemy that punishes close range, or a formation that requires focused fire from a distance. The two halves of “shoot-and-slash” sit next to each other without really interacting. Weapons change the rhythm more than the strategy. A new one feels fresh for a few minutes, then the familiar pattern returns.

This is the game’s main design weakness. Repetition in a crawler isn’t automatically fatal. Diablo is repetitive in a strict sense too. But Diablo hides it behind a variable-reward loop: the next drop might change your build. Riverbond’s rewards are mostly cosmetic or sideways moves, so the repetition shows.

Structure and Pacing

Riverbond’s eight worlds help a lot here. Each realm has its own look, and moving from one to the next does more to keep the campaign fresh than the combat does. Exploration has real rewards: hidden chests, secret corners, and the townsfolk’s side quests, which slow things down just enough to keep a session from feeling like a constant fight.

The campaign is also short, and that’s arguably the right call. Riverbond fits about as much content as its systems can support, and an extra six worlds of the same fights would have made the repetition worse. A focused game that ends before it outstays its welcome beats a padded one. Still, anyone hoping for a crawler to play for weeks won’t find it here. There’s no meaningful endgame or deep build system to justify a long run.

Co-op as the Point

Riverbond becomes a different, much better game with a group. With four players, the light combat becomes a strength. Nobody needs a tutorial, a six-year-old and a parent can contribute on equal terms, and the chaos of four characters smashing a voxel village is the whole show. The game asks so little of individual skill because it’s designed for a room where skill levels vary. That’s a deliberate design choice, and for its intended audience it works.

Solo, those same qualities count against it. Without other people adding unpredictability, the loop repeats audibly. For solo play, lower expectations accordingly.

The biggest structural limit is that co-op is local only. In 2019 that was already a narrowing choice, and today it’s a hard constraint. If a gaming group is spread across different homes, Riverbond doesn’t support how they play, and the only way around it is a streaming workaround rather than real netcode.

Difficulty and Progression

Riverbond is easy. “Undemanding” is the fair word, and the game is built around that. Death costs little, enemies rarely gang up in threatening ways, and bosses are more spectacle than skill checks. That’s right for a family game and wrong for players who want mastery. Progression mostly means unlocking things to try, not getting more powerful, so the game never builds the rising tension that keeps people coming back to a crawler.

The art direction is Riverbond’s best feature. Cococucumber’s voxel style is clean, saturated and readable. It has clear blocky geometry and bright, world-specific colors, and it doesn’t feel like a Minecraft knockoff. The isometric camera frames scenes like a diorama, and the destruction effects give that diorama life. Every world is a pleasure to look at.

There’s a cost to that style. The shared single-screen camera, four players, swarms of enemies and constant cube debris are built to crowd the frame during the busiest fights, and the design leaves room to lose track of your own character in the mess. The HUD stays minimal and out of the way, which helps the look but leaves less information on screen when things get hectic.

The art is stylized rather than demanding, so this isn’t a game that needs high-end hardware. The heaviest destruction scenes with four players are where lower-end hardware would feel the strain most.

Steam: On PC, a single player can use keyboard and mouse, and mouse aiming suits the twin-stick shooting better than a thumbstick. But Riverbond’s whole case is couch co-op, so the practical setup is multiple controllers and a PC hooked up to a TV. If the PC sits at a desk, most of the value goes unused.

Nintendo Switch: This is arguably Riverbond’s natural home. The Switch’s pick-up-and-play design matches the game well. Set it on a table, hand out controllers, start. Short handheld sessions also suit the bite-sized structure. There’s one hardware catch: a single sideways Joy-Con has only one stick, and a twin-stick game really needs two. Four-player sessions work best with full Joy-Con pairs or Pro Controllers, which raises the real cost of that party setup. Handheld mode suits solo play, though that’s also the mode where the game is weakest.

Riverbond knows what it is, and that self-awareness is both its strength and its limit. Cococucumber made a beautiful, very destructible voxel world and fit a simple, friendly brawler inside it. With four people on a couch, it works: anyone can pick it up, and it’s over before anyone gets bored.

Take away the couch and the problems show. The combat repeats, the difficulty barely registers, progression gives you little to chase, and the lack of online play rules out anyone whose friends live elsewhere. Minecraft Dungeons later did the same idea with more depth and more ways to connect. Riverbond keeps a real edge only as a family-friendly couch game. For that specific use case, it’s an easy pick at $4.99. For most everyone else, it’s a mixed proposition: charming, slight, and built for a room many players don’t have.