This game somehow manages to be really frustrating yet so utterly lame at the same time. It's style and presentation is so completely unremarkable. It feels like it's trying to do a "throwback to the retro eras of gaming" thing and does it in the most generic way possible, and thus fails to do what made people enjoy those games in the first place. A good way to describe it is to think of how a TV show or something would make up a fake game for a character to play in a scene with the little knowledge the writers had on video games as a whole and then imagine that game actually being a real thing. The actual gameplay itself is where the frustrating aspects of the game come through. It's sluggish as hell, which doesn't combine well with the barebones and haphazardly designed stages that have no consideration of how the game plays, and as such makes the platforming really boring normally, and really annoying later on with levels that have multiple mechanics going on at once. Those mechanics can be particularly annoying, like the flickering platforms, the game's addiction with several kinds of instant death traps, and the goddamn ice physics which, if the jetpack didn't reset your momentum, would've made certain stages near unplayable, the list goes on. Said mechanics also suffer badly from all of the flaws of the general level design, in that they don't even feel like they had much thought put into them when used in the levels which makes most of the levels feel super similar to each other, and can even bring in situations where certain patterns just don't line up properly causing some very annoying moments to happen. These annoying moments come particularly when the game tries to amp up the challenge, like in the game's later levels, the ghost levels, and the secret levels. Certain moments like phasing right through flickering and moving platforms if you don't land directly on top of them, tight horizonal holes you have to time your jetpack just right or else you just get instantly killed even if you're a few pixels too low, or those dumb unaligned pattern moments I mentioned earlier. The ghost stages and the secret grannie stages are particular highlights of all of the game's bullshit at it's highest point. Practically all the annoyance from the mechanics shine here, especially the instant kills in the grannie stages. (There was one part in a grannie stage in the mountain world that had a literal enemy spam section and I really want to know who playtested that and thought it was okay)

So, whatever. This game's just completely uninteresting to finish and a frustrating nightmare to complete. It's just generally not worth your time unless you really want another completion like I did.

Reviewed on Jun 25, 2021


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