The game rules. Reminds me of Mischief Makers which is big ups from me. I'd like it more if I was better at it. Grappling is fun and the levels are always interesting. Story is hard for small indie games like this, but it was good enough and never made me cringe. If I had the patience of a saint I would go for all the achievements but this game makes up for its short runtime with really challenging cheevos and a ranking system. I would rate this game very highly if that felt accessible to me, but as of now it's just a really good platformer that I enjoyed beating.

The perfect game for any 2D platformer fan. An incredibly charming aesthetic and sense of humor, immediately lovable characters, great soundtrack, and essentially does everything possible with the central mechanic of grappling while never overstaying its welcome. Grappling feels and works great. A lot of the longevity the game has is in attempting get higher scores and rankings in each level, which at first seems easy but eventually demands total mastery of the games controls and movement. Any game that has me repeating one level for an hour in attempts to get the best rank clearly is doing something right.

Spiderman meets Mischief Makers, and it's really fucking good! It wears its Treasure inspiration on its sleeve and I couldn't be happier, genuinely a really feel-good charming game that gave me goosebumps the same way a good sonic or kirby experience would. There's a very fun, simple pleasure to swinging and wall-jumping around carelessly while platforming, and beating up mooks by chucking them ceaselessly into each other. No complicated side-mechanics either - platforming and combat are seamless with each other, and things are kept fresh through the things surround that, like the stage gimmicks. Rena's a great protagonist - it'd be easy to knock her for only knowing how to repeat 'im the hero' ad-hominem, but it works relative to the setting and supporting cast - everyone around her is constantly held back by worries and doubts, but she keeps scraping along, fixated on her one and only goal. Extreme neurodivergent icon. Kinda wish this game went a bit harder with the writing honestly? There's some kind of grander plot revolving around gods and pre-meditation that doesn't feel like it's fully-explained.

One thing Grapple Force doesn't inherit from Treasure's backlog, though, is the boss fight design. Instead of Treasure's pummel-fests, most battles are Nintendo-esque affairs where you use a conditional item to attack them while they're vulnerable. They're still cooler and more interesting than average, but I wouldn't be lying if I said they were pacebreakers.

The game also runs kinda shitty. I'm not the best frame of reference for this since my computer runs most games like ass, but this game isn't doing anything visually straining to justify how oddly it runs. I know it was made on one of those stinky-ass HTML game engines, so I'm gonna assume it's a CPU and object culling issue, rather than graphics. Stages get HUGE past the first world, and populated by a lot of enemies, and I wouldn't be surprised if the game just doesn't do anything to optimize around that. So for a lot of stages, the game can run at half framerate, and there are a lot of damn sections where you'll make amateur mistakes and jumps because of framerate-induced lag.

So yeah, this is kino, anyone looking for another Treasure-core fix should start here. It's another game from the Ukraine itch bundle, so, no excuses