Zissi's Island

After beating it, I have to say that I really enjoyed this! The characters are cute, the gameplay is great, there are some funny moments, etc. I unfortunately got the bad ending, which is a sad ending. :( As of right now, this game is a hidden gem. For only $5, it's definitely worth it!

TL;DR CAUTIOUSLY RECOMMENDED. This game has some serious problems but overall is still a great game. Full Review (so far) I'm recommending this game, but very cautiously. It has some decent humor and platforming and it looks like it will take a couple of hours to beat so if you're starving for a 3D platformer you might want to grab this game but there are some very serious problems as well. The game's controls could use some tweaking. When moving the camera they seem overly responsive, but when trying to face an object that you need to shoot they don't seem responsive enough. When an enemy is attacking you, you have two choices, you can jump on their heads, or shoot tomatoes at them. If they are running toward you quickly then you can wait until just before they hit you and MOST of the time you will land on their hit box, but sometimes you will just land on their heads and not damage them, and then they move you fall in front of them and they start hitting you. Try as I might, this has been a death sentence for me every time. There is no delay between when they hit you and when they can hit you again. There should be a short period of invincibility for the player or else a moment where the enemy stops attacking after each hit. This would severely reduce the frustration that comes from playing this game. The other option is to throw a tomato at the enemies. The problem here is if you are running away from the enemy you have to turn around to throw a tomato at them, but when you try to do that, instead of just facing the enemy, the character model spins on it's axis until facing the enemy. When not being chased you don't really think about this, but when trying to line up a shot that has to be perfectly accurate you become all too aware of the fact that your character doesn't instantly change direction. It takes one or two steps toward the enemy or whatever you're trying to shoot, before you're actually facing the right direction, and even then, if you weren't exactly pushing the right direction, you're still going to miss and have to try to line up the shot again. But the enemies are fast and you rarely have time to do this once, never mind several times. The final problem I want to talk about now is the worst one, the one that made me quit the game and come write this review. I had just spent an hour or so playing the game with my son and we had collected more than five hundred gold and three pearls. We had completed the King's Trial to allow us to go up the mountain which due to the problems listed above was so frustrating I almost stopped playing then, but I pressed through it. I collected a few pearls and then I was in the castle and saw that there were doors you could enter above the entrance to the King. I looked around to see how to get up to them and saw some crates on the one side of the castle. I tried to jump on them to see if I could then jump up to the other doors but instead of landing on the crates I landed behind them and I was stuck. My feet weren't on the ground so I couldn't jump, but I was behind the crate's colliders so I couldn't move either. I tried everything to get unstuck but it there was nothing I could do. I didn't think it would be that big of a deal because I was thinking that each time I went through a door it saved my game. This is because when you die you start at the last door you entered. But when I reloaded the game I was back in the gazebo, the actual save point, with 100 gold and 1 pearl. Back to where I was when I started playing the game today. Everything I had done was erased. There are other annoyances as well, such as when trying to get a good view of a moving platform so that you can accurately jump onto it and you can't because there is a tree in the way every time. This is most frustrating when trying to climb the huge tree because that moving platform is on a very long looping animation. It would be far better to have the animation only play when you are on the platform but instead there is a sign telling you to wait and be patient. Seems like a really weird choice to make as you are the only one using the thing. After reading this you could be fogiven for thinking I hate the game, but I don't. If you don't mind dealing with these issues (though if you're reading this dev, please make sure you fix the getting stuck problem. A simple suicide button would work) what you have is a fun collectathon platformer with a decent sense of humour. It's quite a good looking game as well and when you're not dealing with these problems it's fun. There is a pretty sizable world to explore that just keeps getting bigger (not really, but I keep finding new areas that I didn't know about.) It costs less than buying lunch at McDonald's (at least here in Canada) and it's worth what you pay. Just be prepared for these problems.