Tiny Barbarian was a Kickstarter game that was billed as a kind of retro throwback to classic action games. It came out over the course of four years in 3 parts, with the third and fourth parts coming out at the same time. I got this game pretty cheap on PC back around when Act 1 came out, enjoyed Act 1 well enough, and then put it down and waited for the other acts to come out (aka promptly forgot about it). The physical version on Switch goes for about 20 bucks now, so I picked it up at Best Buy a few weeks back and only now got around to playing it. There is fun to be had with this thing, but the conclusion I came to in my 6.5 or so hours with it is that it's a culmination of everything wrong with retro throwback action games XD
Tiny Barbarian really goes out of its way to evoke the feeling of games like Ninja Gaiden and Castlevania on NES, but with longer levels. You have a weapon that routinely feels like it doesn't have the range to comfortably deal with the enemies thrown at you, there are a lot of tricky jumps that range from close calls to pixel perfect bullshit, and the bosses range from fun, well-flowing events to the more frequent super frustrating bullshit. In scaling up an older action game-style to modern game sizes, Tiny Barbarian mostly succeeds in emphasizing how excruciating those games could feel. Levels are so dependent on positioning yourself well to both defect incoming enemy attacks (either slashing them or their bullets away from you) in combination with doing the tricky platforming that a lot of the game, particularly the boss fights, come down to rote trial and error to just memorize it as efficiently as possible. While the Mega Man homage section in the last act was fun, most of what this game did was remind me of just how much I do not enjoy the bulk of the games this game pays homage to.
Mechanics and design aside, the game's presentation is quite good, although with some faults nonetheless. The game has a very pretty art style (in that "what if the SNES/Mega Drive could do lots of frames of animation"-kind of way) and the music is also routinely good. The only issue is that it is very frequently a problem of just keeping track of where your character is on screen. Particularly in the harder boss fights, the titular character being so genuinely tiny can really inhibit your ability to even maintain a hold of what's going on if you aren't paying strict enough attention to both your location and the location of your enemy and all their projectiles.
Verdict: Not Recommended. As said before, there is fun to be had with this, but it's moreso in the bad way that hard games can be enjoyed: the relief when you finally finish a very difficult part you just wanted to get past. This is a game that feels too routinely unfair for me to ever feel comfortable giving it any kind of recommendation. That's not only because there are SO many other 2D action platformers that do this kind of action better (albeit most of the ones I can think of are rogue-lites or Metroidvanias), but also because if the game didn't have such forgiving checkpoints, there is no way most people would ever bother trying to see this game to the end, and that's for a reason beyond just "it's a hard game".
Tiny Barbarian really goes out of its way to evoke the feeling of games like Ninja Gaiden and Castlevania on NES, but with longer levels. You have a weapon that routinely feels like it doesn't have the range to comfortably deal with the enemies thrown at you, there are a lot of tricky jumps that range from close calls to pixel perfect bullshit, and the bosses range from fun, well-flowing events to the more frequent super frustrating bullshit. In scaling up an older action game-style to modern game sizes, Tiny Barbarian mostly succeeds in emphasizing how excruciating those games could feel. Levels are so dependent on positioning yourself well to both defect incoming enemy attacks (either slashing them or their bullets away from you) in combination with doing the tricky platforming that a lot of the game, particularly the boss fights, come down to rote trial and error to just memorize it as efficiently as possible. While the Mega Man homage section in the last act was fun, most of what this game did was remind me of just how much I do not enjoy the bulk of the games this game pays homage to.
Mechanics and design aside, the game's presentation is quite good, although with some faults nonetheless. The game has a very pretty art style (in that "what if the SNES/Mega Drive could do lots of frames of animation"-kind of way) and the music is also routinely good. The only issue is that it is very frequently a problem of just keeping track of where your character is on screen. Particularly in the harder boss fights, the titular character being so genuinely tiny can really inhibit your ability to even maintain a hold of what's going on if you aren't paying strict enough attention to both your location and the location of your enemy and all their projectiles.
Verdict: Not Recommended. As said before, there is fun to be had with this, but it's moreso in the bad way that hard games can be enjoyed: the relief when you finally finish a very difficult part you just wanted to get past. This is a game that feels too routinely unfair for me to ever feel comfortable giving it any kind of recommendation. That's not only because there are SO many other 2D action platformers that do this kind of action better (albeit most of the ones I can think of are rogue-lites or Metroidvanias), but also because if the game didn't have such forgiving checkpoints, there is no way most people would ever bother trying to see this game to the end, and that's for a reason beyond just "it's a hard game".