This game starts off as a pretty solid, easy kid's platformer type of game. And that's what you'll get early on. It is decent, not especially engaging but I am going to bet if I was the age of the target audience (young kids who'd want a McDonalds liscensed game) it wouldn't be so bad, nonetheless I would say after a while this game gets really grating? The thing is the game never gets hard, pits can be defeated with balloons which can even be strategically used to skip large parts of the stages even, but at times it just kind of adds in some obtuse stage design or gimmicks. For example, the brief ship level with the penguins actually confused me for a bit, and had me trying other stuff until I realized you were supposed to platform to the right (which looks the same as the left, which is death if you go that way). The end result is spending some minutes dwadling around while not in any realistic danger. especially since health pickups are impossibly common in this game.
In general this game feels very reliant on "gimmicks", in the sense that the platforming very rarely evolves beyond the simple and so instead it is spiced up with some gimmick that the game feels like it adds more to it, like having sumo wrestlers that stomp down and cause the track platforms it is on to be angled differently. This doesn't actually change up gameplay, it's the same simple jumps to do them, so it didn't do much for me. Boss fights in this game are also weird? You need to deliberately get hit by one of their attacks so they can suck up your life, then attack them while they chew the life gem after attacking, and frankly this mostly leads to fights becoming dragged out. It's nearly impossible to actually die to any of them except for the final boss since their patterns are simple and they spawn enemies that drop health (otherwise they could become unbeatable easily), so you just wait for the attack and sometimes only get a few hits. The final boss is frustrating because they set it up so if you mess up his easy pattern, you nearly unavoidably lose half your health, necessitating either grinding health to win or dying if you make more than a single mistake. It's still fairly easy, but it is annoying to die in this way and since the fight isn't super clear at first it will be a "gotcha!" at first.
Graphically the game is solid, but for some reason this music just absolutely slaps? Must be that Treasure power. The final boss theme is way too intense for the puzzle boss fight, the stage music all bop with some of the moon stages bein' reeeeal funky, this was by far the best part of the game, maybe this should have just been a McDonalds album. Also, for some reason this game just. Has racist caricatures?? What?
I know some people got nostalgic memories for this but gotta say I wouldn't recommend this one.
In general this game feels very reliant on "gimmicks", in the sense that the platforming very rarely evolves beyond the simple and so instead it is spiced up with some gimmick that the game feels like it adds more to it, like having sumo wrestlers that stomp down and cause the track platforms it is on to be angled differently. This doesn't actually change up gameplay, it's the same simple jumps to do them, so it didn't do much for me. Boss fights in this game are also weird? You need to deliberately get hit by one of their attacks so they can suck up your life, then attack them while they chew the life gem after attacking, and frankly this mostly leads to fights becoming dragged out. It's nearly impossible to actually die to any of them except for the final boss since their patterns are simple and they spawn enemies that drop health (otherwise they could become unbeatable easily), so you just wait for the attack and sometimes only get a few hits. The final boss is frustrating because they set it up so if you mess up his easy pattern, you nearly unavoidably lose half your health, necessitating either grinding health to win or dying if you make more than a single mistake. It's still fairly easy, but it is annoying to die in this way and since the fight isn't super clear at first it will be a "gotcha!" at first.
Graphically the game is solid, but for some reason this music just absolutely slaps? Must be that Treasure power. The final boss theme is way too intense for the puzzle boss fight, the stage music all bop with some of the moon stages bein' reeeeal funky, this was by far the best part of the game, maybe this should have just been a McDonalds album. Also, for some reason this game just. Has racist caricatures?? What?
I know some people got nostalgic memories for this but gotta say I wouldn't recommend this one.