This is a frustrating review to write, because at a base level... this is more Lovely Planet. And I love Lovely Planet! But... man. Some of the obnoxious level design quirks that had started to bubble up in LP2 came to a full boil here and kinda ruined large swaths of this game for me.
Okay, so, first off, a quick ranking of all the game modes, from worst to best.
Jelly: I mean, duh. This mode is intentionally designed to be obnoxious. I don't know why there are three level sets. I don't think it would be too bad if not for how unlikely it is you'll ever be able to accurately judge where your shots end up during jumps, and boy howdy does the game want you to make a bunch of annoying air shots from like the middle of the second playlist onwards. Between the fixed jump arc, the lob shots, and a general lack of clever level design... yeah, not much fun to be had here.
Fortress: Jelly is the only all-around awful mode but this one's not... great. The three shot spurts make aiming harder, especially in movement-heavy levels, and the dash doesn't feel great - especially upwards movement, where I often got caught on cliff edges. There's also a lot, a LOT, of gotcha traps here that just feel unfair. The first set felt way harder than the second set, though, and I mildly enjoyed this as a whole.
Tunnels: Oogh. I want to like this one but this mode is where all the game's worst level design traits come into play - more on that later - and for whatever reason, this mode also tends to have exceptionally tight time trials mixed with its uber-fast gameplay that make it unquestionably the hardest mode in the game. Like, Tunnels 2-1 for example requires around 50 shots in something like 26-27 seconds? If most enemies didn't take three shots and the gameplay wasn't so aggressively twitch I might've liked this one but this is LP2 Abyss-levels frustrating to me, nearly quit during the second set of levels.
Cascade: The newest mode, and probably the most forgiving and slowest-paced of them all. Like, a bit trial and error based but not... suuuper hard (yet). Not particularly fun though but it's inoffesnive.
Beach: ...gotta be honest, I always forget this mode exists. It's just not got much going for it. No jumping leads to very basic level design, lob shots are back and as annoying as ever, but at the same time it's not particularly challenging by the game's standards, it's just... there.
Tactical: Functionally halfway between Mountains and Jelly, with a faster-pace and faster shots mixed with no air shooting and fixed jump arcs. Generally fine, even gets pretty clever in the third set, but I'd never pick it over Classic or Mountains.
Blink: This is a funny gimmick and super fast-paced in a way that doesn't grate because the levels tend to be over so fast. Probably the most unique mode and if I were to pick a mode that needs a second level set it'd be this, but on the other hand... what more -can- you do with it?
Classic: Boring to say but obviously the bog-standard lovely planet gameplay is gonna be some of the best. It's not peak lovely planet and there's one reeeeally long level in the second set that should've just been split in half, and it takes until the third set for clever, interesting level design to emerge, but at its core it's... well, solid lovely planet gameplay.
Mountains: Probably the least divergent from the "classic" style in that the only changes are faster bullets and a double jump but boy howdy if a third game is made please base it entirely off this one. Faster but not too fast gameplay, harder but not too hard challenge, tight but not too tight time trials, long but not too long levels. I used single levels of this playlist as rewards for clearing other, less fun playlists because of how much I enjoyed it and specifically saved the last level here for the very last level in the game I completed. More, please.
...yeah, so when I only start really enjoying maybe the last 3-4 of the various gameplay styles, that's already a problem, but aside from the wholly malformed Jelly mode, I think they all have potential. It's just that the level design is... problematic.
For one, it's just, on the whole, a lot less clever. There was a tangible evolution of the base gameplay in each world of the original - apples to test your accuracy, homing bullets to test your crowd control, swamp fog to test your speed and reaction time, and the sheer puzzle madness of mountains that made it feel like an entirely different game. The only two playlists that encroach upon the cleverness of LP1 Mountains are Classic 3 and Tactical 3. Something like 20 levels out of a total 200.
Apples, also. Are just used in worse ways here. Rarely in the first game would you have to do a long, semi-blind apple shot, and often whenever you did, either the level would be really short or it would be one of the first shots in the level. Dozens of levels in this game require either multiple hard apple shots (Jelly is notorious about this) or place a particularly difficult apple shot right near the end of an already too-long level, which.
Level lengths. The longest level in the first game still clocked in at under 30 seconds, and it was a village level. Where, as the game got harder, more demanding, levels generally got shorter, with only a handful of Mountains levels even breaching 20 seconds. 25-30+ second levels are the norm in a lot of playlists here, and with how much denser the levels are with stuff to do they tend to feel even longer than that. Tunnels 2 is the most egregious but it's present in almost every single game mode to some extent.
It feels a lot more like what made Abyss so awful in LP2 - an overcorrection to a supposed difficulty problem by just, making the levels have more stuff, instead of designing harder, tighter challenges. A fifteen second level with five hard shots is not half as hard as a thirty second level with ten hard shots, it's about 20%, maybe even 10% as difficult, because you have to keep repeating that same hard first 15 seconds to even get a shot at the second half. There were a few long levels I spent upwards of an hour trying to ace, only for the next, much shorter level to take me a few minutes. There's just no difficulty curve, even within playlists or game modes. Jelly 2-5, the hardest level in the game. Tunnels 2-3, the second hardest. Tunnels 2-1, the third hardest. That one really long Classic 2 level, probably the fourth hardest just on sheer size.
There's also, just. A lot more gotcha moments and trial-and-error in general. The lookahead is back but it's not gonna help you with the abundance of moving blobs, it's not gonna let you know when and where apples are going to fire, some apples even hidden in water/lava in tunnels 2 for added effect. You learn levels by grinding through the early parts to get a chance to peek at the second half, which, again, doesn't feel good at all.
Oh, and, the secret stars. Uhh. Screw right off with the Arcade mode stars that are 8, 10, /15/ levels deep into the middle playlists. Classic 2-15, has an arcade mode star. That's not cool. That's way too much moderately difficult level to get through all for just one single star. Also some of the hidden stars I have no clue how anyone found. I used a guide for them. Sue me.
I will commend the game for having some good ideas and I proooobably enjoyed more levels than I didn't, but the bad ones stick out in my memory way more than the rest. And you're certainly getting your money's worth here - something like 200 levels, double the size of the first game for just over the same price - but, again, the quality isn't there... the game is still being updated fairly regularly even a year later, from what I can tell, the soundtrack's probably the best in the series, fundamentally I see the core of a good game here but the level design just... really lets it down, man, and that's a shame as a long-time fan of the series.
