BAKERU

I bought this game heavily discounted (thankfully), on the premise that it's from the makers of Goemon. It's barely that, but rather 60 levels that are a mixed salad of bare bones platforming, bad Mario Kart and Star Fox levels, some auto-scrollers, and maybe 10 or so legitimately interesting level ideas. This results in the game feeling incredibly padded, and you will be horrendously bored up until the tail end of the game where you will start seeing a couple of ideas that are neat. The game's collectables are largely boring, and have no bearing on your progress: trivia facts, souvenirs, and tanuki. The former two have zero impact on your progress, and you can pretty much ignore them. The tanuki are there to help upgrade your mech, but I admit I couldn't be bothered to find them as you can brute force your way through pretty much all the mech fights with zero upgrades. Unfortunately, due to the nature of the game sporting multiple level design ideas, you end up largely underwhelmed with very little to look forward. I was pretty much bored up until level 40 where some ideas started becoming interesting, but by then I learned you can skip past enemies beyond the ones you need to defeat for the stage's ending flag, as collectables had no real purpose. You can pretty much brute force all but one boss in the game (specifically a mech fight) and even that can still be muscled through to a degree, so I very much felt like I was on auto-pilot for the entirety of the game. Only get this game if you have a kid to entertain, or perhaps someone new to games period. Even then, you're better off waiting for it to become heavily discounted.