Tiny Barbarian DX is a 2D platformer built on the foundation of “difficulty for the sake of it”. It borders on being a rage-game, so there is no way for me to be fully objective in the review. I originally played a bit of the game when it came out on Switch. Nicalis sent me a review code, and I hated it. I couldn’t walk into this game without an unbiased mind-set, no matter how hard I tried, but I wanted to lay every card on the table before reviewing this properly. What do I think of Tiny Barbarian DX? Well, let’s get into that.

Tiny Barbarian allows you to run, jump, grab onto ledges, and ride specific animals. You can swing your sword in different directions and do a sort of, diving drop move. As a platformer, the movement feels fine enough. Combat, while it doesn’t feel terrible, it certainly feels off to me. Levels are long and grueling, and traversing them can be either kinda fun or meh depending on how much stuff the level is throwing at you. That’s the big issue of Tiny Barbarian DX to me, I never had fun, but I was never enraged either. I felt bored, like the game was wasting my time and like my attempts at beating it were useless. Tiny Barbarian also has boss fights which usually provide a decent challenge, and have easily readable patterns, but they still require a bit of skill to dodge.

Levels try to be “well designed” but usually end up flopping on a few basic principles. You get introduced to a singular trap or enemy in a safe environment, which should make things easy to learn. However, in practice they progressively make those things harder to deal with. You go from, “You shouldn’t take a hit of damage” to, “We’re going to kill you cheaply and without any chance of survival”. The Barbarian has a health bar, which is fairly large and usually it gives you enough hits, however, the levels love bottomless pits. There are many places where the game wants you to climb on vines or jump across the sky, but the issue is that when you take a hit, you go flying until you hit the bottom of the screen; there’s no chance of saving yourself.

Tiny Barbarian DX feels like it wants to be Castlevania, except it throws a no-ranged Arthur from the game Ghosts ‘N Ghouls into a Castlevania designed game and says, “Done.” The levels don’t feel designed around the character and there are many instances where I found getting hit entirely unavoidable. It stopped me from having fun outside of the boss-fights, and it kinda sucks since I’m a fan of most of the rage-games that this game takes inspiration from.

Tiny Barbarian DX’s presentation is actually really good! Sprites and animation are fluid and easy on the eyes, only sometimes do they blend in a bit too much. This creates scenarios where you see things you shouldn’t or don’t see dangers right in front of you. Sound design is brilliant; the music is great, and sound effects are crunchy. Everything feels satisfying and happy, sort of like Super Meatboy’s music though, for me, Meatboy’s music propels your determination, Tiny Barbarian’s doesn’t do that at all for me.

Tiny Barbarian DX’s length entirely relies on the skill of the player. It has 4 levels for you to attempt, but I didn’t bother beating it. Tiny Barbarian DX failed as a rage-game, and never allowed me to enjoy it the way I would Castlevania, Super Meatboy, or Mega Man. I felt as I’ve said earlier, like I was wasting my time. So, I decided to put that time into other things. Rage-games are hard to rate since everyone has their own tastes, so I recommend you look into I Wanna Be The Guy or Super Meatboy instead. Tiny Barbarian DX as a rage-game makes me say to myself, “I’m not mad, just disappointed.” I can’t call Tiny Barbarian DX a terrible game, but the seal is entirely dependent on if I had fun with a game. I had fun a total of three times in seven hours of gameplay.

Tiny Barbarian was a Kickstarter game that was billed as a kind of retro throwback to classic action games. It came out over the course of four years in 3 parts, with the third and fourth parts coming out at the same time. I got this game pretty cheap on PC back around when Act 1 came out, enjoyed Act 1 well enough, and then put it down and waited for the other acts to come out (aka promptly forgot about it). The physical version on Switch goes for about 20 bucks now, so I picked it up at Best Buy a few weeks back and only now got around to playing it. There is fun to be had with this thing, but the conclusion I came to in my 6.5 or so hours with it is that it's a culmination of everything wrong with retro throwback action games XD

Tiny Barbarian really goes out of its way to evoke the feeling of games like Ninja Gaiden and Castlevania on NES, but with longer levels. You have a weapon that routinely feels like it doesn't have the range to comfortably deal with the enemies thrown at you, there are a lot of tricky jumps that range from close calls to pixel perfect bullshit, and the bosses range from fun, well-flowing events to the more frequent super frustrating bullshit. In scaling up an older action game-style to modern game sizes, Tiny Barbarian mostly succeeds in emphasizing how excruciating those games could feel. Levels are so dependent on positioning yourself well to both defect incoming enemy attacks (either slashing them or their bullets away from you) in combination with doing the tricky platforming that a lot of the game, particularly the boss fights, come down to rote trial and error to just memorize it as efficiently as possible. While the Mega Man homage section in the last act was fun, most of what this game did was remind me of just how much I do not enjoy the bulk of the games this game pays homage to.

Mechanics and design aside, the game's presentation is quite good, although with some faults nonetheless. The game has a very pretty art style (in that "what if the SNES/Mega Drive could do lots of frames of animation"-kind of way) and the music is also routinely good. The only issue is that it is very frequently a problem of just keeping track of where your character is on screen. Particularly in the harder boss fights, the titular character being so genuinely tiny can really inhibit your ability to even maintain a hold of what's going on if you aren't paying strict enough attention to both your location and the location of your enemy and all their projectiles.

Verdict: Not Recommended. As said before, there is fun to be had with this, but it's moreso in the bad way that hard games can be enjoyed: the relief when you finally finish a very difficult part you just wanted to get past. This is a game that feels too routinely unfair for me to ever feel comfortable giving it any kind of recommendation. That's not only because there are SO many other 2D action platformers that do this kind of action better (albeit most of the ones I can think of are rogue-lites or Metroidvanias), but also because if the game didn't have such forgiving checkpoints, there is no way most people would ever bother trying to see this game to the end, and that's for a reason beyond just "it's a hard game".