Aesthetics on point and the movement was absolutely nailed here. I can see myself booting this back up near constantly whenever I have a half hour to kill just to vibe and freestyle around, so on those counts this is everything it needed to be and more. Also ended up very impressed with the level design for the most part, thought the sandboxes they made were fun to move around in and secrets were placed just as perfectly as they would be in a THPS. Only quibble I have on that front is that certain things are needlessly scarce, why are there so few spots per map to reset your heat or switch out your character, and why are they sometimes extremely out of the way. Character switching especially just does not seem like it should be so cumbersome.

Soundtrack is also a banger as well it should be, though I will say there are one or two really, really repetitive duds and the game sort of frontloads them, leaving a bad first impression.

I appreciate that the story here is much more ambitious than I would have expected, but I don't think it amounts to much in the end aside from one or two cool moments and some occasionally amusing dialogue. It honestly had me going for a second thinking it was about to get really interesting before sort of just... pivoting away from any sort of intrigue to instead have a pretty by the book ending.

Lastly, I think this could have benefited from some more polish, especially in the cutscene and sound design departments. Cutscenes often feel pretty limp with very little in the way of sound effects, shots seeming to hang for strangely long amounts of time, and the soundtrack which complements the gameplay so well often feels poorly implemented in these scenes as well.

I think what Team Reptile did here is one hell of a start though and really hope they continue with this series because now that they have all of this to expand off of I think a Bomb Rush 2 could be even better.