Candy Rangers

I’m fairly mixed on Candy Rangers here but I’ll have to lean more towards the negative given the severity of some issues. To give credit where it is due, the visuals are very charming and simple, appealing to the nostalgia from games back during the height of the DS era. The end cards do a lot to add character to the rangers and are often lighthearted and cute. I enjoyed the way the game incorporated the varying face buttons into the gameplay loop, and you also get a fair bit of skill expression in having boost/slow mechanics, jumps, and melee attacks. It’s not terribly complex on paper but the way the levels demand you to juggle multiple different mechanics helps keep them hectic and exciting. As simple as it is, I do like the level design and how the environment looks as you progress through a level. Most levels have alternate pathing so it's neat to be able to access these paths, and see how they crisscross with the main levels normal pathing. Some decisions around the rail shooter experience do detract from it a bit. [list] [*]I enjoyed the novelty of using different face buttons for different enemies, but with the way some enemies are positioned you quite frequently clip an enemy with the wrong attack. Enemies can die in just a hit so it can immediately disqualify you from a 5 star run which left me frustrated enough to abandon any effort to 5 star all the levels. [*]Another occasional issue surrounds the bullet pathing from your Candy Ranger to the reticle. Most of the time this is fine, but in cases where you’re on a different elevation than an enemy it can lead to annoying moments where you’re aiming on target but bullets are all hitting a cliff or a ditch. A few times it has felt extremely unfair that the game wants you to hit the enemy at a very specific angle, and if you miss the chance you spend several seconds blasting a wall until you run into the enemy. [*]Lastly, some levels' enemy spawn points are fairly imbalanced, essentially spawning on top of your characters for an instant hit. I understand the game has a boost/slow mechanic but it shouldn't be expected that you memorize exactly where you have to use these in order to avoid instant hits. For a real shooter it's normal to have to eventually memorize enemy positions to maximize score, but for casual experience having enemies spawn on you in an unreactable manner leaves bitter experience. [*]There’s also the issue of visual clutter when various enemies of different types start appearing at once. Combined with the bombastic visual effect from your weapons it can be hard to distinguish various elements from each other. It doesn’t help that the button assigned to each enemy isn’t terribly distinctive. Would have been appreciated if the enemies themselves were more strongly color coded, or if certain enemy types corresponded to the buttons instead like all bird enemies to the A button or something similar. [/list] Outside of gameplay, unfortunately I’d say there aren't enough music tracks in the game to carry it all the way through, some tracks losing their charm from all the reuse. A game like this with more simplistic visual design would have greatly benefitted from having a more varied soundtrack. The audio balancing is a little off as well with some sfx being ear splittingly louder than anything else in the game. The story is fairly basic and while I won’t begrudge the game for it I think it could’ve used a bit more charm or polish to construct a basic narrative. Instead it’s not only forgettable, but sometimes distracting from the gameplay. I do want to like Candy Rangers more but there quite isn’t enough here to make it an easy recommendation from me.