Cloudberry Kingdom™

[h1] TLDR: 4.5/10 It’s a Really “Hard” Platformer With Mediocre to Bad Controls. It’s Main Saving Grace Is Having a Bangin’ Soundtrack and Being a Funny Co-Op Game (Which Doesn’t Even Work Anymore Without Some Serious Finagling) Also 99.9% of Players Will Be Stuck With 13/16 Achievements Unless You Cheat Your Way Through the Back Half of Chapter 7, and Also Figure Out How To Fix the Bugged and Broken Achievements. No Thanks. Not Worth Anyone’s Time Doing That Grind [/h1] [h3] Actual Review (No Spoilers) [/h3] This was actually one of my very first games on steam. That and the fact you can no longer buy it on steam are the only reasons I haven't gotten rid of it. I decided to finish it out after at least 10 years at this point. How is it? Yeah it's ok. Generic platformer with a Mario type story (the cutscenes also play at like 10 fps lol). You won't notice most if any issues until you start wrapping up chapter 6 and head into chapter 7. If you use this strictly as a couch coop game and you AREN'T trying to 100% it, then yeah I would recommend it (obviously you'll have to find a steam key for it somewhere, or just play it on a different platform lol). Now the story technically ends at chapter 6, but of course they had to have an achievement for beating chapter 7. Which, by the way, is an extra 69 levels, when every other chapter is around 30-40ish. Before I talk about chapter 7 though, there's some other really stupid and annoying achievements. Firstly, getting 1.5 million in arcade mode is but a taste of the chapter 7 achievement. Secondly, the achievement for completing a chapter deathless is straight up bugged and won't unlock. And thirdly because of the jankiness of coop, getting the 4 player bungee achievement would also be impossible. I literally had to plug and unplug all four controllers into different usb ports at various times in the character select to be able to get 4 players. And only 3 characters were functional. Ok, so chapter 7. It gets increasingly more dumb over the course of about 50 levels, some more difficult than others, but starting from about level 300, the gameplay boils down to "If you're off cycle by half a second, restart. Also good luck dodging precisely with these absolutely horrendous hitboxes". And the hitbox jank REALLY makes the levels way more difficult and infuriating than they should be. Things like the fire bars aren't accurate at all when that much precision is required. Not to mention some of the abilities like phase bob and wheelie you can just throw precision out the window. Also the fact they straight up DISABLE the time slow and pathfinder powerups in chapter 7 is the nail in the coffin for this being doable without dumping hundreds of hours into this ONE single achievement. So you know how long specifically level 319 took with cranking the speed down to 10% with cheat engine? 15 hours. Which is over half of my playtime. So if scaling that up to 100% speed would even be accurate which it probably isn't, that's 150 hours for one level. Not to mention the preceding 5 levels are also basically dice rolls at normal speed. The challenge of the game isn't even rewarding either. Because of the random level generation, all that is required is trial and error trying to get stupidly precise jump heights. So what are the positives of this game? Well the aforementioned soundtrack is awesome, and the whole game having the random level generation gimmick is probably really cool from a programming perspective, but for gameplay it's alright. And it DEFINITELY doesn't scale difficulty up very well. Worth your time? Absolutely not. Finishing the story and getting the arcade achievements legit is good enough for me. Pretty much only would recommend it if you're doing coop or have nostalgia for the game. Stay away from the achievement grind at all costs. 4.5/10