Balloon Girl

THE GAME There's a gathering of sorts. A girl, boy, baby, and dog are all outside when a storm comes along and blows away all of their magical balloons. You must collect them all, which means exploring 50 levels, suspended by two balloons. 2D retro style platformer with hand drawn pixel graphics. There are four playable characters. The aforementioned girl, boy, baby, and dog. The game seems to play the same regardless of which one you choose. As I recall you get four lives. You die by hitting flying insects, spikes in the walls, ceilings and floors, and of course the flames from torches. After all flames and balloons don't mix well together. Once you use up your lives you either continue, starting with a fresh set of lives, or you can restart the game from the beginning. If you choose to continue you again can select a character between the four, and will start with the last level you completed. THE GRAPHICS Hand drawn pixel graphics. Looks like it could have been released for the SNES or Genesis, but with a much sharper image. THE SOUND What can I say? It's good in a retro kind of way. The music is good enough not to be irritating. How's THAT for a recommendation? THE CONTROLS I tried my Logitech Xbox 360 controller first thing and since it worked I didn't try to use the keyboard. The game never has you select a control option and the button configuration is not re-mappable. Strangely the B button is the action button. The D Pad is for your direction of travel. You must continue to tap the B button if you wish to stay aloft. CONCLUDING THOUGHTS You can rest on surfaces without spikes, but as there is a timer involved I wouldn't recommend resting for more than a few seconds. I can, however, recommend this game.

I ran into a massive bug that always put me at level 2 regardless of the level I beat, causing me to constantly have to run through the previous levels just to reach the newest level, over and over again. I ended up spending more time traveling than playing any one level eventually. Even ignoring that glaring issue, there isn't anything here worth recommending. The game is very simple and it rarely if ever throws anything new your way as you progress. The timer is just a nuisance and it discourages exploration. By the same token, it makes coins almost pointless as you lose more points by way of excess time banked at the end than the points you'd gain by picking up a coin (the coins themselves don't do anything besides give some points). This is most likely the intention, but I dislike not being able to directly control the character. This makes trying to fall down way harder than it needs to be. Having lives and a "game over" is also pointless as you're not forced to start over (thank God), but you also don't suffer any punishment either, such as losing your current high score. The game is quite easy overall. I've played more involved and better platformers (and less buggy) for cheaper.

Balloon Girl is yet another of literally thousands of 2D retro pixel "platformers" infesting Steam and lowering the average quality of all video games everywhere. Although, in this case, while it's tagged as a platformer, it's more like an Angry Birds style runner. it's mostly a one button endless jumper game. You can chain any number of jumps to get higher altitude, but you don't jump very far and you fall down fairly slowly too. It's really garbage tier shovelware. From a technical perspective, the game doesn't meet basic minimum requirements that most PC gamers expect as standard. A choice was made to use obsolete, decades old retro pixel "art" as a substitute for contemporary PC graphics. It's unclear if this is due to lack of budget or talent, regardless, the overall visual quality of the game is extremely low as a result. There's no options to change the resolution for the game or customise the graphics settings. There's no way for gamers to ensure this is running at the native resolution of their displays... there's no guarantee this game will look right on any PC as a result of this hamfisted design decision. There's no way for gamers to try improve the low quality graphics. The controls can't be customised, which will be an annoyance for many, but it can also render the game unplayable for differently-abled gamers. These technical defects push this game below acceptable standards for any modern PC game. Balloon Girl has an overly optimistic price of around $6 USD, it's not worth it given the defects and shortcomings with the product, especially considering the sheer number of completely free, much higher quality games on Steam.