enjoyed this quite a bit!! the floaty jump is fun. i wasn't expecting the level design to have as much verticality and secret hunting as it does! searching for passage and collecting dots at dead ends to spawn in a platform is a satisfying loop. the invincibility power-up gives some nice stimulation as well. you're often on pretty tight timer to break through a door/floor with it, and if you fail, it only takes seconds to walk back and try again. the latter half of the game has some cool precision platforming. paired with the startlingly fast auto-scroller stages, i imagine some would find parts of the journey too hellish for a game about donald duck, but you're given plenty of lives and checkpoints. for 100% completion, you're granted a bonus level consisting of a new locale with unique mechanics and enemies! good stuff!

i've only played like half a dozen gameboy color games, but i'm under the assumption that this is one of the system's most gorgeous. the palettes are pleasant and the whole screen is filled with detail. lotta isometric kinda stuff goin on with the terrain. some super top-notch animation on display here as well! truly the disney of video games...

RANKING OF QUACKERS
1st: gbc
2nd: n64/dreamcast/pc

While Console and PC versions of Donald Duck: Goin' Quackers/Quack Attack is a clone of Crash Bandicoot, Game Boy Color version is a clone of Rayman, which makes more sense because it was developed by Ubisoft, and Rayman GBC was released earlier the same year.

You control Donald Duck through progressively tougher stages to rescue Daisy from evil magician Merlock. The controls are pretty simple, Donald can jump and double jump, and that's it, the only other action he can do is ground pound with B button after picking an invincibility power-up to unlock a way forward in some places. Items Donald can collect include some sort of discs that give an extra life once enough have been collected, said extra lives lying around, and said invincibility items that are usually required to destroy some obstacles blocking progression.

Said progression is fairly linear, with some secrets offering extra lives. As I mentioned before, levels get progressively harder, first two worlds aren't too tough, but later levels become pretty challenging, to the point where there are spikes almost everywhere, and avoiding spikes on moving platforms, drawing parallels to Rayman. Other Rayman-like elements include trigger points that'll make certain things appear when you touch them, straight from Rayman 1, climbing vines and similar objects in a similar fashion, similar slippery physics, and even a doppelganger gimmick where a helicopter will mimic your movement and you have to avoid colliding with it to not take any damage.

The level design is honestly pretty solid, not without shitty moments like boulders you didn't see coming in later levels, but I did enjoy the game and its challenge quite a bit, in fact, I 100% completed the game, collecting all the missing blueprints, unlocking an extra world with 4 more levels that are just as challenging. Granted, I was only missing blueprints in the first world so I didn't have to replay some of the harder stages, but still.

Of course, this game does have some flaws. First, there's a controls oddity where instantly switching horizontal direction will stop you in place, even though I'm still holding the direction and should be moving, which can be a little annoying. Hitboxes aren't always consistent, so sometimes I'll take damage when trying to jump on top of an enemy. The bosses are also inconsistent, the first boss was confusion as you have to jump where beehives are and feed the bear at the bottom some honey while avoiding bees with annoyingly tiny hitboxes. 2nd world's Beagle Boys are surprisingly easy, and Magica De Spell is tough but features checkpoints between hits. Last boss, Merlin himself is pretty frustrating, featuring somewhat erratic movement as a flying thing, after which you have to avoid lava bubbles with precise timing so to not take damage, and then jump on top of him some more while avoiding projectiles. This is where I lost almost all my lives, but eventually I beat him. Good riddance.

But overall, I did enjoy this game. I can see this being frustrating for younger audiences, but I can recommend it to fans of hard platformers, or original Rayman (or the GBC one at least). The levels become challenging but are mostly of fair variety and are well designed, the graphics are nice with great looking backgrounds and with some fluid animations and the music is decent. A solid platformer for the 8-bit handheld.