Gameplay: 70/100
Graphics: 90/100
Sound: 8/10
Playability: 50/100

Final verdict: 78/100. Simplified physics and a few missing parts slow but can't stop this entertaining new Need for Speed excursion.

i remember this game from being one of the launch titles available for gba, but after some googling it seems that they only released it on jp and eu wile skipping na, which is sad and may explain why it isnt that well known. anyway i bought rayman advance instead of kuru kuru kururin when i was a child so who cares.

the gameplay is simple, move the rotating stick across the map without hitting walls or obstacles while moving through narrow pathways to end up reaching the goal. pressing a/b speeds up the stick and pressing both at the same time speeds it up even more...and that's everything.

but oh boy this game doesn't stop delivering, as simple as it sounds it starts becoming more challenging and it makes you wonder things about how should you play: am i properly positioned to reach the other side? should i lose precision to gain speed or should i do a pixel perfect movement? is it worth it to get hit by a wall and get a 3 seconds penalty to rush the stage rather than do it correctly? should i risk it? if hare's records are so good then why isn't he the one getting my family together? all this choices can be taken in less than a second or you could take forever to plan your movements...while those 6 numbers on the left side of the screen are taunting you since you know, you could be doing it way faster and better! what will you choose? think faster or go suck it, you are third on the records!

howlongtobeat states that the avg time for completion is around 4-6 hours, and i think that beating machine land 3 took me around 2 hours because i suck, so i think i needed way more time for it. speedrunners can beat this in 15 minutes and man, now i regret getting rayman advance instead of kuru kuru kururin because i could have gotten better too at this and brag about it because this game is truly fun and challenging. on the other hand, rayman advance was just enough to mention it here and that's it. i do care now.

a bunch of additional maps (in fact its not even that hard to figure out who made each map after some exploration) complementary to the original doom, bundled together with a price tag, being the most prevalent trend of their design "more enemies OR bigger map = better"...so in lots of them you end up being in a big square fighting a bigger horde of enemies coming at you. hey at least you have the super shotgun to do so...but is it worth it to disregard any interesting progression just to face more enemies?

well yes it was 1994 and people just wanted to kill more demons and the super shotgun is nuts so who am i to judge?

this may be trying to be a walking sim about nature, but even for its procedurally generated islands everything seems so notably artificial and lackluster of any kind of enthropy that it just ends up becoming an uninteresting experience without any surprises, kind of like how a basement dweller would picture the outside world. the only purpose of this game seems to be just bedazzle the player, but on the process it reduces its landscapes to pure eyecandy and its animals to boinging pixels that fart "ding dong ding" noises at you when you get closer, without any connection between the elements of its ecosystem.

deliveries and story are ok but damn i loved building roads, that was my jam. taking resources from every possible prepper, looting the shared lockers and downing every mule outpost to take their ceramics and metals only to bring them to the nearest autopaver then bam a road pops up and you are saving time for every upcoming delivery. this game loves to pull out the "You bring people together, you're their bridge to the future" shit everytime for narrative just to confuse the player, the main focus in here is not building bridges but getting them highways rolling. in fact, could you even imagine current america without roads, only filled with bridges? i sure as hell could not because i have never been in america.

screw walking around tons of rocky pathways or getting your truck stuck, commit to the tar gods and build roads. oh and ziplines are also cool because apparently roads cannot be built on snowy mountains.