Cave Story was a highly influential cult classic due to its nature as a lone man's passion project that evolved into a fleshed out, genuinely great game. How did Studio Pixel follow up on its success, on the 10th anniversary of the game no less?
By releasing a completely mediocre, uninspired, restrictive platformer.
Even when you deprive Kero Blaster of its context and accept it as its own thing, the game is painfully basic and uninteresting, with not much thought being put into the level design, the evolution of the layouts and mechanics, or simply introducing newer players to action platformer fundamentals (which is a niche an easy game like this can and should fill). A lot of KB plays itself, which is made worse by the fact that air control is so restrictive. There's some moments where that restrictiveness leads to some decent on the fly decision making as you're forced to dodge things, but it rarely actually matters due to the extreme straightforwardness.
Unlike many similar retro games, KB doesn't have overarching systems that at the very least acknowledge better play, either- no timer or score based ranking to be found anywhere, let alone performance-based upgrades and powerups (for clarity an example of that is Mario's Fire Flower) - so it ends up not being very replayable.
I do have to praise the improvements related to accessibility when compared to Cave Story. There's no tedious difficulty spike needed to get the true ending, and the permanent upgrade system paired with the abundance of money means that even if you do lose all lives and start the stage over a few times, you'll be able to upgrade weapons fairly quickly and go through the stage smoother. But in the time this game was released in, this is nothing new, either.
There's some fun moments every now and then, and the final boss was fairly good, but it's too little, too late.
I hear that Hard mode is quite a bit more interesting, and I suppose I'll get to it eventually. In the meantime, I'll be charitable and round the game up to 2.5 stars, I guess. Which might be too kind, it's probably closer to 2, but it's not like I actively dislike KB or anything. It's competent and mildly entertaining. The game has a pretty grounded design philosophy that doesn't contradict itself much. However, I would definitely call that design philosophy underwhelming, especially in context.
By releasing a completely mediocre, uninspired, restrictive platformer.
Even when you deprive Kero Blaster of its context and accept it as its own thing, the game is painfully basic and uninteresting, with not much thought being put into the level design, the evolution of the layouts and mechanics, or simply introducing newer players to action platformer fundamentals (which is a niche an easy game like this can and should fill). A lot of KB plays itself, which is made worse by the fact that air control is so restrictive. There's some moments where that restrictiveness leads to some decent on the fly decision making as you're forced to dodge things, but it rarely actually matters due to the extreme straightforwardness.
Unlike many similar retro games, KB doesn't have overarching systems that at the very least acknowledge better play, either- no timer or score based ranking to be found anywhere, let alone performance-based upgrades and powerups (for clarity an example of that is Mario's Fire Flower) - so it ends up not being very replayable.
I do have to praise the improvements related to accessibility when compared to Cave Story. There's no tedious difficulty spike needed to get the true ending, and the permanent upgrade system paired with the abundance of money means that even if you do lose all lives and start the stage over a few times, you'll be able to upgrade weapons fairly quickly and go through the stage smoother. But in the time this game was released in, this is nothing new, either.
There's some fun moments every now and then, and the final boss was fairly good, but it's too little, too late.
I hear that Hard mode is quite a bit more interesting, and I suppose I'll get to it eventually. In the meantime, I'll be charitable and round the game up to 2.5 stars, I guess. Which might be too kind, it's probably closer to 2, but it's not like I actively dislike KB or anything. It's competent and mildly entertaining. The game has a pretty grounded design philosophy that doesn't contradict itself much. However, I would definitely call that design philosophy underwhelming, especially in context.