So I kickstarted this campaign, and then bought it outright for an additional $20.00 just to help the creators, so if anything, I'm biased toward this game, not against it.
Despite the review I'm about to give that is going to conclude rather negatively, I am still going to give it a "recommend" because I think that there are matters of taste to consider, and the larger part of the game-play is decidedly good.
I'll start be enumerating the positives, of which there are several:
1. The graphics look great and attractive.
2. A lot of the various bits of dialogue and jokes manage to be funny.
3. The essential mechanics of moving and shooting are satisfying and easy to pull off. When looking at footage, I oftentimes thought to myself that it looked like the double-jumping by shooting down would be clunky, but no, it becomes second nature almost immediately.
4. Bosses are cool.
5. The music is excellent, including fanfare.
6. I like the various upgrading systems that give you a sense of progression, but I will note here only that there is a negative counterpart to this.
Now for the negatives, and I'll reiterate that these are according to my taste:
1. I understand that the game is meant to echo classic games (there's even a Mario parody level, or perhaps the creators think of it as an homage), but this game was made by adults for adults. I actually think the pun-heavy, frivolous dialogue isn't just unserious, but childish; not merely silly, which is fine as Monty Python is silly, but it's infantile. I don't think the creators really thought about this too deeply, they were more focused on the game-play and thought, perhaps, that just a bit of goofy characterization and whimsical dialogue would be fine, but indeed, the result is something that is so un-stimulating, so blandly devoid of intellect, that it becomes insipid. Imagine if you could actually care about any of the characters, or at least be impressed by the well-considered dialogue, the carefully rendered writing—and why not? I'll tell you why not: Because writing is difficult and not just anyone can do it. You need someone with skill. Someone like myself. I would have done it, and done it for free. But did they ask me? No, of course not, because if they had, this game would be twice as good.
2. As a corollary to the previous point, there is very little sense that I am doing anything for a reason. You meet a character (a boss, in fact) who is also on a similar quest, and he's not much excited by the prospect of competition, so he attacks you. This should feel like we now have a rival, but because of the lack of depth in the writing, and since no additional effort was made to give the player the sense that any of this means anything, you handily defeat him and then proceed across the levels with, again, no real feeling that you're on a quest. You're just platforming. If you're happy to just play the game without any deeper feelings, then this may not be an issue for you, but for me, jumping and wall-jumping and shooting aren't alone sufficient to keep me interested.
3. As yet another corollary to the previous two points, the game doesn't often give you the feeling that you are on a quest, or have a quest, even when it actually does give you a quest. At one point you talk to this archeologist who is either lost, or is just being petulant, one or the other—the dialogue makes it seems like one is true and then the other, but without a good transition that might suggest the first assertion was a lie, but instead, like the author forgot what he was doing with it—and he asks you to find his fellows. There is no "Quest Obtained" message, no sound effect, no sense that you've actually gained a mission or goal. This might not be as big of a problem (though a problem nevertheless), except that when you go find his buddies, they also only give you a vague notion that they'd like you to find him, but in such a way that it almost feels like you've done things out of order, or as though there is no genuine connection between them and that you're just supposed to chit-chat with them and not do anything. Still, out of curiosity, I wandered back to the original "lost" archeologist and, indeed, his dialogue had changed and he said he'd return to the campsite. Great. I guess. He does, and nothing apparently happens. There's no, "Quest Accomplished!" message, no rewards given by the archeologists for a job-well-done, nothing. I suspect that this quest will pay off later, but for now it feels like nothing was actually done, and it was supremely unsatisfying. It almost feels janky, like this portion of the game was unfinished.
4. Speaking of unfinished, more than one sign in the game doesn't work. There's no prompt to check the sign and you cannot check it even if you press down on the analogue pad while standing in front of it. There was one spot where the text, which normally has sound effects and moves in a presumably intentional pattern, just appeared all at once for the duration of a conversation, but only that one, and there was nothing special about the conversation that it should have done that. There are also times throughout the game where the character just stops as if running into a wall, but there's no wall, and then he continues as if nothing happened. I don't play games to be gaslit by the protagonist! (I'm kidding.)
So the result of this is that I reached a difficult part in the game, and I died twice, and I could have gone at it a third time—I was improving each time, and this is the kind of game that's fun enough and has smooth enough mechanics that I didn't feel especially annoyed by the movement system: it was just a difficult spot—and around an hour and a half in, I called it quits. The game didn't have enough to it to compel me forward. The enemies are fine, the movement mechanics and shooting are fine, the graphics are nice, everything's nice and fine. But I just don't have a feeling of immersion. I don't have enough reason to proceed to want to take the time to get better at it.
This is a review that really is more for the creator than for the player, and what's more, it's for the creator's next game, not this one: He cannot, or will not, overhaul the whole progression system (story, dialogue, quest system), and understandably so; however, I think that if he ever makes a game like this again, he should strongly consider how to create deeper investment in the player, because unless the game mechanics are outrageously different and fun (which is not how you should think about making games, by the way; it's far better that you do everything right and be able to make multiple fantastic games than to focus on doing one thing at a once-in-a-lifetime level of quality that you may not even be able to achieve in the first place) then you need something else that can draw the player in. That might be visual storytelling that is so dense that every moment is spent by the player observing and learning and putting pieces together, or by having characters and quests and writing that are all to such a high standard that the player always feels like he's a part of something that matters.
As it stands, it's above average in moment-to-moment game-play quality, but that's the only thing it has, and, for me, at least, that's not enough.
