PogoChamp

I had a ton of fun playing PogoChamp, despite essentially never playing similar games. I found the controls intuitive and responsive and was really impressed by the variety of the level design. Mastering the movement is not easy, but I was quickly hooked and within a day I was flying through levels, doing flips and trailing rainbows behind me after my properly-timed jumps. For the difficulty curve, the first few levels teach you the basics before the difficulty starts to really ramp up. By the middle levels, you need a solid grasp of the art of pogo, and the game also starts adding in alternative modes of movement, like swimming and rocket jumping. Many of the later levels are extremely difficult. Each level has a set of goal times that earn you stars if you reach them. I liked to go for 3 stars on every level as I initially worked through the game. This helped me develop solid fundamentals that were useful later on, but it certainly isn't the only way to play. I've watched others have fun just beating the hardest available levels and then backtracking later on to improve their personal best times on earlier levels. If you ever get stuck on a level, you can always watch replays of the best players using the excellent in-game replay system. You can even try to get a world record! I held a few at one point, and enjoyed the friendly competition for some of the individual level leaderboards. I imagine that at the time of this review, there are still many world record strategies yet to be developed. The music and graphics are somewhat simplistic and the community around PogoChamp is very small at the time of the review. These things were not dealbreakers for me, but you can always watch a little gameplay to see if it is a problem for you. One caveat, though: although all the early levels tend to have an almost identical aesthetic, there is somewhat more variety later on, largely through certain thematic levels like the piano level (one of my favorites, featuring a piano you can play) and the Breakout level (where you play the classic game Breakout), just to name a few.