"So close yet so far" is how I would describe Demon Turf, in short. In long, read the rest of the review.

This has been my most anticipated game ever since I saw the trailer for it, everything from the sprites to the movement and level design just looked exactly like what I was looking for. This feeling was only emphasized by the demo, which turned me from "can't wait to see what that looks like" to "day 1 purchase". The interesting thing about this demo is that along with all the stuff that excited me, there were also a couple of things that concerned me, and ultimately those concerns were validated by the end of this playthrough. Demon Turf is a very unfortunate case of not being able to stick the landing.

First off, I love the movement in this game. Or, I love most of it. You have a jump, triple jump, side jump, wall jump, several of the 3D Mario essentials are here. Where it gets interesting is when you get off the ground, as Demon Turf emphasizes movement in the air, between each jump. You have a double jump that is short and can be used for either height or distance, but definitely not both. There's also a spin move that can be used to extend a jump, and when you jump out of this spin, you perform this game's long jump. This means that the long jump can not only be done in the air, but also since you can spin without moving forward, you can do the long jump at a complete stand still, and during the jump you can adjust its length by holding the control stick either back or forward. This to me is the best part of Demon Turf, chaining all of your jumps into each other gracefully, traversing an obstacle course quickly, managing to skip a certain obstacle through a clever combination of ground and air jumps, really feeling like you're in full control of yourself and your moveset. This moveset does take some getting used to due to certain rules put on the order of how you can do things. You cannot do any other air jump after a long jump, and if you double jump you can spin but not long jump. This slightly tripped me up at the beginning, but it eventually never became a problem, but keep in mind this idea of certain things not being able to be done after certain jumps, this will become important later.

So we have a very fun moveset that allows for engaging, creative movement, and the first couple levels really show that this moveset works best in obstacle course-style levels, usually with a good amount of verticality and variety in obstacle types. Demon Turf's flaws all come from failing to capitalize on this strength, and it starts with the combat. First of all, yes this game has combat, and second of all it deserves some credit for not just being some three hit combo nonsense a lot of stuff from the 2000's did. The way it usually works is you come across a circular area with nearby spikes or pits, and enemies trying to knock you into them. Enemies have no health, so your attack is a punch that pushes enemies away, ideally towards something that kills it like the previously mentioned spikes and pits. You can charge it up to push them far, or do several smaller punches to get the same effect in more moves, and your spin can stun them. This would be fine if this game was more in line with Mario 64's enemy style, where they exist as other obstacles that you have to overcome or avoid altogether, but instead they most often appear as segments where you have to stop platforming and focus on defeating whatever amount of enemies are in an area. There's usually no getting around these segments, the only exceptions are some very precise moments of sequence breaking that can skip them, and I took the sequence breaking option whenever I could. Combat just isn't fun in this game, your punch often shoots enemies not towards where you want them to go, but slightly at an angle, just barely missing the spikes you're trying to knock them into. After you hit an enemy with a charged punch, they go into some sort of invulnerability state for a couple of seconds, which makes the process even more frustrating. You have to charge your punch, avoid getting pushed by any enemies, hit them with the punch, hope you didn't accidentally throw your punch right next to the enemy instead of right at it, hope your punch actually knocks the enemy into something, and if it doesn't start getting your next punch ready or address the other enemy who might just instantly kill you because he has spikes attached to his body and you die in one hit.

Speaking of one-hit kills, we should talk about checkpoints. When you enter a level, you have three checkpoints, and you can place them anywhere in the level you want. Ideally, this means that there's more room for riskier platforming and experimentation, as when you die you'll always start again at a location you're comfortable starting at. This also makes backtracking for collectibles not a hassle, as you can warp between checkpoints. But, and maybe this is a me problem, more often than not this system served to betray me whenever I died halfway through a level and forgot to place any checkpoints until I'm all the way back at the beginning. Granted, most of the levels in this game aren't so long that it takes forever to get back, but sometimes a sequence that's fun one time around isn't as fun the second or third time. It also doesn't help that most of my deaths were from the instant kill enemies I mentioned earlier, and not finishing a combat section means the enemies respawn and you have to do it all over again. I think it's absurd that this game has no way of getting another hit, not a Crash Bandicoot style power up or a three-point health system, because the combat shouldn't be where the difficulty comes from. I'm OK with pits being instant death, but getting side tackled by an enemy off-screen into spikes, that's not a fun way to die, I didn't learn anything or get better, I was in the middle of my least favorite part of the game and now I'm gonna have to do it again!

So the platforming is good and the combat sucks, so really, it's up to the levels to salvage this, as there's a wide variety of level types here and what they focus on can differ greatly from one another. Unfortunately, I believe every level has at least one combat section, but if the level makes these sections a little more painless and delivers on the tight and expressive platforming the demo promised, we can still have a good, but flawed game on our hands. There are four worlds here, and the first two do a good job of focusing on what's important while still having some variety. World 1 is very linear, and encourages going quickly through the stage and finding different ways to climb upward, as most of them are very vertical in structure. There are some levels that focus a little more on combat, but it's the first world so everything is still fairly short. World 2 introduces more variety, where we have wider, more open levels that involve going between different, large sections, still mostly linear but allowing for moments of exploration and less obstacle course-esque, a little more in line with something like the Sonic Adventure games, or Rayman 2. These two worlds are great, even if the bosses here are kind of nothing. But then we get to world 3 and my hope for this game plummets greatly.

In world 3, levels get much longer. Not only that, but combat becomes a lot more brutal due to more instant kill enemies and more combat sections in general. The levels begin to feel like they're forgetting what the strengths of the game are and it all comes to rock bottom at the stage Urban Tops, a stage name I remember solely because of how awful it is. The game wants to have it's New Donk City, a big city level with tons to explore and lots of nooks and crannies and the novelty of it being a fun platforming level while still being recognizable as a city. But this isn't structured like Super Mario Odyssey at all, it's about finding the goal and a couple collectibles on the way, it's linear in the end, so this is actually a terrible level idea for this kind of game. The end result is you wandering aimlessly through a boring city with nothing to actually do besides just sort of poke around hoping to find the next part of the stage. There are little sections of obstacle course platforming occasionally, but they take place in basically a different dimension than the actual level, which is about wandering into the right building or alleyway until you accidentally find the goal. It's the absolute low point of the game, and indicative of the fact that the people making it don't understand what the strengths of the thing they made actually are, and as if this world wasn't bad enough it ends with you getting the worst turf ability, but first I need to actually talk about turf abilities (I know, this is a long one, I'm sorry).

At the end of each world, before fighting the boss, you unlock a turf ability, which are basically new ways of traversing levels and taking on enemies. The first one is a grappling hook that's honestly kind of boring. You use it when you see an object to swing on, or to drag something towards you, and usually I just ended up dragging enemies right into my face and then getting killed. It uses auto-targeting, and it mostly gets the object you intend to grab, but there are definitely moments of "no, not that one". Then there's the rollout, which is easily the best of the abilities. It basically gives you the supercharge from Spyro, and all of the sections that require it are usually very fun, and the ability in general is fun to use whenever you can. The fourth ability allows you to slow time on objects, which doesn't really come up that often and so isn't actually that interesting or helpful, and I skipped the third ability because I need another paragraph to rant about it.

The third ability is a glide, and it fucking sucks. You control how high or low you glide by moving the camera up and down, and it just never feels graceful or fun. You also come out of the glide rolling, meaning you can't do any jump out of it or just stop in one place after coming out of it, so landing anywhere precise is a nightmare. On top of this, it feels every section that required the flight really demands you use it not only in a very specific location both close to a ledge while still being high, and not only getting in a triple jump before going into it for max height, but also pointing the camera as close to being directly up at the sky as it can go in order to be able to clear whatever gap is in front of you. This means the game now goes from "this gap is too wide to clear with any of my jumps, I guess I have to find another way across" to "OK I failed to glide to this ledge five times already, but maybe I'm just not doing it at the exact right arc of my jump, or maybe I need to point the camera even further up, OK I missed it again, etc". The thing is World 4 actually has some of the best levels in the game, it comes close to redeeming the game, but nearly all of them have these unbearable sections that require precise use of the glide, and it just kind of pisses on everything for the rest of the game. Like the combat, it's at its best when it's painless and simply requires getting from a very high point to a low point, but it never becomes fun.

On top of all this, the grappling hook and the glide move are the two turf abilities I want to single out for how they interact with the other jump moves (remember when I said something about certain things not being able to be done after other things? Well here it is, like 6 paragraphs later). You can only grapple onto something if you jump once, you can't do it just from the ground and you can't do it from a double jump or spin. The glide is sort of the opposite, you can spin or double jump before doing it, but can't do anything once you get out of it. These restrictions just completely interrupt the flow of movement this game encourages in the beginning. So many times, my natural instinct was to spin before a grapple in order to get myself in the right place, but no, there's a bad arbitrary law in this world that stops that. Speaking of the spin, it's kind of bad when the game starts. There were way too many instances of trying to spin onto a platform and just kind of rubbing up on the cliff, but you can buy a mod early on to make the spin much, much better, to where it floats upwards alongside staying in the air, so much better that it might as well have been the default state of the spin.

Since I brought up mods, I think I can finally move on to the side content of the game. When I played the demo, I noticed in the "quest" section of the pause menu, which tracks your progress across all the side modes and main levels, the game makes a joke along the lines of "oh boy this sure is a lot to 100%!!!" and that worried me. I don't know who told 3D platformer developers that their game needs to have a bunch of side mini games that aren't fun or platforming based, but I hope that person knows I'm upset with them. Most of the side content gives you Sweets, which are used to buy cosmetics, or cakes, which can also be found in the main levels and are used to buy mods. Mods can give different parts of your movesets and abilities different effects, like making you fall slower, run faster, or allowing you to charge your punch even farther. When you start the game you see there aren't that many mods and go "Well maybe I'll find some more interesting ones as I unlock more" and then you never unlock more, and you never gain the ability to equip more, what's available to purchase at the beginning is all there ever will be. Outside of buying stuff, there's a side mode focused on combat, and I did none of it. There's a golf mini game that's kind of fun, but never feels like the kind of thing I'm thrilled the developer made. Like, OK you can do golf, doesn't mean you HAD to. The two highlights for me are the arcade and trials. The arcade hosts what are very close to exact replications of levels from several different Mario games and it's weird. The slide from Cool, Cool Mountain, one of the secret stages from Sunshine, Flip Swap Galaxy from Galaxy 2, it's cool that they recreated them but very odd. I've never seen a game just recreate levels from a different game, but I can't help but kind of mark out for it, they’re honestly pretty neat. The trials mode is essentially this game making its own Sunshine secret levels, each amping up the difficulty from regular levels and each involving some really great novel concepts for levels. These are some of the best parts of the game because they focus on the strengths of the moveset, and stretching it to it's greatest potential. It also comes up with some really out there level concepts, so it doesn’t get stale. A Hat In Time had levels like these, but I think these are much better and more challenging. And then you get to the levels that involve the glide, and then you silently give up on this game.

The other place to get Sweets in this game is through the second visit mode, in which you go through a remixed version of all the levels of each world for not only these Sweets, but also a battery. You see, you need 50 batteries to get to the last area, and finishing a stage gives you a battery. If you go through the game without doing any of these remix levels, you will only end up with barely over half of the required amount. You have to do a good amount of these second visits, and while the levels are kind of different, having to just go through all the levels again doesn't feel exciting. The layout is new, but it's still very obviously the same level, and being forced to do almost all of them instead of this being mostly optional is insane. There's an option to just get the battery from these levels by paying in Sweets, and I went from "I'm never going to use this" to "Please make it so I never have to revisit the World 3 levels".

It was honestly kind of heartbreaking when I did that, because I started off ready to go for 100% only to end up desperately wanting the game to end. It was the opposite of when I stretched out a game to hope it never ends. I was dreading every part of the second half of this game because I could feel everything getting worse and less exciting. There's a story btw, it's kind of nothing and I feel like it could be so much more. The idea of a main character who just wants to take over Hell for no real reason other than spite is really cool, but the game doesn't do anything that fun with the idea. The main character is just kind of generically sassy to people and everything feels like a third-rate Cartoon Network show, like one of the ones they import from Canada. Anytime I thought something was going to happen in the story, nothing happened. I know it's a bit silly to rag on a game like this for having a boring story, but I was looking for SOMETHING to latch onto at a certain point. The art style and 2D sprites are fun, but if I'm being honest, the main characters are the only characters that actually look good in this style.

Now, I spent a lot of time in this review just rambling and ranting about all my grievances with this game, so why is this not a 2-star or below? Well, I still believe that this is some of my favorite 3D platforming in a long time. The good parts of this game are incredibly strong, and if you're a 3D platformer fan who can put up with some major flaws, you will get some joy out of this. Maybe wait until it's at a much lower price. I want to believe in Demon Turf, I want to be in its corner, but god damn does this game make that hard. A Hat In Time stays winning, I guess.