Freddi Fish and Luther's Maze Madness is ATROCIOUS.
This might be the worst game Humongous has produced. It's ABSURDLY frustrating. You might look at it and go, oh well it's a kid's game right? It's probably not that bad, but oh let me tell you right now it's unbelievable.
Once again, like all these other minigame games Humongous made, you get 3 lives, if you run out you get booted back to the level select and your progress is reset. That sounds almost fair in some of the others, but in THIS one... in THIS game, because the levels eventually get so absurdly long, Freddi is so impossibly weak, and the enemies are so incredibly dangerous, THIS game very quickly after the first 20 levels or so grows from very difficult, into outright impossible.
I refuse to believe anyone actually has ever beaten this game before without using the 'junior' settings for infinite lives.
There's a variety of enemies in the game but once you get to a certain point, the game pretty much stops using the 'lower level' enemies that just meander aimlessly, slowly and randomly, and it starts almost exclusively using enemies that either, soft-target you when they aren't wandering randomly, i.e. chasing you if you're near enough or in their sights, or it uses enemies like the 'dogfish' that does, absolutely NOTHING but CHASE you, WHEREVER you ARE ON THE MAP, REGARDLESS of where you are in relation to it, or line of sight, or whatever, UNTIL IT HAS KILLED YOU!
And this is a game, if you don't know, if you haven't really played it or looked at the screenshots or whatever, where, THE ENTIRE GAME IS MADE UP OF ONE-WAY SINGLE TILE WIDTH CORRIDORS WHERE YOU CAN VERY EASILY BECOME COMPLETELY TRAPPED. So you die in this game, ALL the time, and sometimes it is completely impossible to avoid through no fault of your own, simply because the enemies decided to herd you around the level in a specific way.
Not only that, but it gets more absurd: the levels aren't just 'one' screen in this game. Oh no. No, they can be 'many' screens. The last level for instance isn't even the longest one, and it's about 4 or 5 screens. I was keeping track of one level I wanted to talk about, 24, but then it started to be more like I had 2 levels I wanted to specifically mention, then 3, then it was like the entire back HALF of the game is just an unending nightmare of completely unfair enemy placement, incredibly long levels, and levels made up of tedious gates within gates that you open to get keys to open other gates so you can open more gates.
The randomness in the enemy movements is one of the two things that completely destroys this game. All they needed to do was implement some rules for these enemies, and then have those be the challenge. For instance, imagine if sharks always turned left. Instead they just seem to do whatever they want, except if Freddi is within 3x3 tiles around them in which case they beeline her.
By the way, speaking of enemies, they are all completely unburdened by any of the stage hazards that affect Freddi. Of course, if you hit them with one of the boulders or rocks found in later stages, they do get flattened - temporarily. Yes, unbelievably, even if you hit an enemy with a hazard, THEY DON'T DIE. EVEN THOUGH ENEMIES ARE NEVER REQUIRED TO SOLVE ANY PUZZLES! You'd think they might have the tiniest bit of mercy, and just let you take enemies off the screen, but OH NO. THIS GAME is BEYOND HARDCORE for ABSOLUTELY NO REASON. I literally don't understand it at all.
The other thing that kills it, is the UNBELIEVABLY bad controls. I mean, you look at this game and you think, well it's probably not THAT bad, right? But it is. It's the worst. Freddi never ever stops moving basically except in very specific situations. There are even hazards in stages, that FORCE Freddi to move in specific directions, and these are everywhere, sometimes it just knocks you back, sometimes it forces you to move horizontally or vertically for a set amount of tiles, but either way, these forced moves combined with the fact you ALWAYS have to be moving and the completely incompetent AI of Freddi when you click in a direction, makes this game THE worst to control. It's insufferably infuriating.
When you click somewhere for Freddi to go, unless it's basically a completely open adjacent tile, you get NOTHING. Sometimes if you just didn't click nicely enough directly in the space you want to go, Freddi will completely turn around and just go the opposite way you want her to. It feels like playing an RTS where you control one soldier with extremely bad AI and incredibly unresponsive response times, because Freddi also does that thing where she kinda has to reach the next tile over before you can call her back, just like some other tile-based games from the 90s. Usually it's not something that kills you, but in this game it WILL kill you all the time.
There's no invulnerability states in this game basically ever, when it comes to animations. If an enemy ever comes into contact with Freddi's sprite, you lose a life. This is a big problem when it comes to using the portals in this game, because the animation for using the portal actually takes about a second to complete, and Freddi can actually die during that even though enemies otherwise have no interaction with portals, they don't go through portals or anything.
This game also has portals that take you to other portals on the same screen. These are just a nightmare to deal with, because as above, if you just clicked through one, and you're trying to exit it? If you click ANYWHERE but DIRECTLY on an adjacent space, Freddi just goes back through the portal, which in some cases could just literally kill you.
Though Freddi Fish and Luther's Maze Madness does have powerups, they're also THE worst, most miserly powerups I think I have ever seen. Not only do they last a truly incredibly short amount of time, the game only VERY rarely doles out any of them, and when it does, they often are placed somewhere optional, or, they are sometimes even put somewhere they just won't be of any use.
You can get a 'worm doodle' which is something from the other Freddi games, which gives you a speed boost for a short time. This might sound great, and it is on some levels, but many just involve having you sit there waiting for a wall to open up or whatever, so it's genenerally that helpful. There's the bubbles that you can blow to temporarily disable enemies for about 3 seconds, however, I still have no idea how to even activate them. It just seems like if you hold the mouse button down in the vicinity of Freddi, sometimes she shoots out bubbles in a direction, it's completely unreliable to even use, let alone hit enemies because they only go in a straight line, and as mentioned, the duration is so bad you only get a few seconds to swim past.
Then finally there's the 'big bubble'. This is different to the bubbles, because this one is basically like the power pellet from Pac Man. While you have it, enemies you touch get flattened. They don't die, or anything, they just get back up a few seconds later, and these are so scarce I think I only got to use it like 3 times over 50 levels.
The marketing on the store page also lies. It says 'over 50 maze-crazed caverns to explore' except there's only 50 levels in this game.
I don't think I have anything positive to say about this game, I pretty much hated every moment of playing it.
