This is the best showcase of level design I've ever seen in my life, hard as balls but when you finally achieve what you were aiming for (just complete the level, get the speed star, get the 3 stars...) you don't believe that you've done it, the game demands from you a level of muscle memory, aiming and platforming at the same time like no other single player "campaign" thanks to the level design being about what you do, not what you see, you become so aware of every jump you make, every shot, every button you press, even being aware of your camera movement is the difference between getting on time to shoot a bomb or not.
I have 12 hours at the time of this review, I got every speed star on worlds 1 to 4 and the majority on world 5 as well, a have probably restarted more than a 1000 times easily and every time I was aware of what I did wrong and how I could optimize my gameplay, also as tight as the level design is, the levels never told me what to do like every single AAA and the vast majority of indies; because the objectives (kill all red enemies and touch the pink light) and the conditions of failure were crystal clear, it wasn't "that platform is clearly higher than the rest, i have to double jump now weeeee" it was "by taking this road, I'm able to get to the finish", that's level 1-1, it gets more interesting of course.
I recommend trying the speed star on every level you can, I felt that the difficulty scaling was extremely nice when I did that because I "trained", the times aren't crazy, no big mistakes with some sloppiness is more than enough, because while the game demands you a lot, it knows you are human.
That feeling when I wanted to push myself so much from an specific level where I found a risky but fast strat, restating when I felt I could do it faster that when i finally finish that level for the first time I was top 90 in the world, few things can top that.
I have 12 hours at the time of this review, I got every speed star on worlds 1 to 4 and the majority on world 5 as well, a have probably restarted more than a 1000 times easily and every time I was aware of what I did wrong and how I could optimize my gameplay, also as tight as the level design is, the levels never told me what to do like every single AAA and the vast majority of indies; because the objectives (kill all red enemies and touch the pink light) and the conditions of failure were crystal clear, it wasn't "that platform is clearly higher than the rest, i have to double jump now weeeee" it was "by taking this road, I'm able to get to the finish", that's level 1-1, it gets more interesting of course.
I recommend trying the speed star on every level you can, I felt that the difficulty scaling was extremely nice when I did that because I "trained", the times aren't crazy, no big mistakes with some sloppiness is more than enough, because while the game demands you a lot, it knows you are human.
That feeling when I wanted to push myself so much from an specific level where I found a risky but fast strat, restating when I felt I could do it faster that when i finally finish that level for the first time I was top 90 in the world, few things can top that.