I am sitting genuinely asking myself… is this my fave ending to a game since maybe I ran credits on Xenoblade 1. I am in shock of what that final core close out did. In terms of pushing the player? I got wrecked many times, in terms of ramping scale and having just wondrous attack patterns? Just sensational. They ramp so many set pieces that I just couldn’t help bus ask every few moments “they doing this too”. It’s also proof to me of how to have your cake and eat it too in terms of how they integrate moutful mode. They get to do ridiculous things but they earned it because of what each boss battle is like.

Which just reflects the most flattering part of the game… sensational bosses even before this ending. The cheetah girl and the armadillo just have patterns that are just so damn fun to get engaged with. It works because of the freedom of choosing different abilities in order to approach in ways that either feel more satisfying, to make it easier or to make it more difficult. These power up abilities are so good. The sword and hammer have always been personal favorites in the series but you get new great stuff like the ranger. Then they add that you can upgrade them and the upgrades aren’t always technically linear. Sometimes you might prefer a lower upgrade level because of rapid fire or other idiosyncrasies. If they ever bring this mechanic back, there is so much that they can do to make that experience flourish even further.
What to me is also great… is level design. The late level abandoned malls, the haunted parks and the extremely novel frozen subway stand out. The way they introduce the levels especially in the latter part is just beautiful set up to make you feel immersed even when they switch to their isolated camera. But what makes these levels better than there visuals? Is there tricks. See in order to complete the game you have to find waddle dees in the levels. You get a few by just beating the level but each level has 4 hidden tasks. You can think of these hidden tasks similar to Dreamland 3, where you had to intuit what to do to get hidden gem at the end. This takes it further with 4 ones per level but the level design is often extremely intuitive about it! You will often do one innate interaction just out of curiosity or regular play and then you see that it’s part of the hidden task and it makes you comb the level thinking in different ways. This is on top of one of any 4 hidden tasks is finding the supplementary waddledees. It’s so rewarding whenever you start to think about the puzzles or hidden areas. It’s also mind blowing when you see you missed one, it shows that even what can feel simplistic that there is so much hidden.

I think the part of the game that’s not truly excellent might be moutful mode. It’s fun and it’s well integrated into the puzzle elements that the game does. But outside a few moments I can’t quite say it will leave a deep impression. I do wish Kirby had a quicker run just by a hair! The game feel for him is great throughout but it’s something that I wish he had more! Also shout out to the ice world music, just jaw dropping.

This was a blast. I been beaming writing this. I can see room for improvement but man the joy of this? This is gonna sit with me! Also what a great reference to Streets of Rage 2!

I dislike how this game feels. The movement of your character being very connected to the movement of your reticle here feels awful. I felt like dodging here was just not great. At first I assumed that means my playstyle for this game was wrong. Which the first 3 levels I changed how I approached where you have to hold a to automate targeting and I began to hit a flow state for that. I began to think I figured out what was expected but some bosses and regular enemies aren’t designed for that .Levels 5 & 6 are much faster shooting galleries that don’t align with the automated targeting. Level 4 feels like the best approach on it. It’s hard to tell which shooting approach is expected at times. Some variety makes sense but it feels that the alternating with different enemies wasn’t as great. I think I might have felt better if hit detection and dodging made more sense to me. There are some bosses with lasers that look far away from me but seem to hit me anyways. In general this didn’t vibe with me. But it says volumes to me if I had a play session of only a level one day and was dreading going to the next one after beating the previous one.