This was a lot better than I was expecting. I played the demo and liked it well enough, but thought it was also pretty juvenile and shallow. After the promising reviews came out, however, I decided to pick it up as a holiday game to play with my three year-old, and the majority of my experience was played one or two stages at a time with him at my elbow, telling me where to go, which enemies to suck up and which secret paths to take. It's the first time we've played a game together like this and it was great for some father-son bonding (his new favourite imaginative game is to chase me around, pretending to be Fire Kirby).
There have been lots of comparisons made with Mario Odyssey, and though those are definitely valid, in truth this feels as much an action game as it does a platformer, with a much bigger focus on combat than I could have predicted. The bosses which round out each biome require some positively Dark Souls-style dodging and bait-and-switching, while the anime madness and bombast of the final stages feel straight out of a Platinum game. At the same time, the fixed camera stages, all riddled with secrets and things to discover, put me in mind of Captain Toad.
I finished the game at 90% complete, including all the post-credits stuff, which provide a sort of greatest hits remix of the best parts from the stages in each of the biome and were good fun to run through again. I'd likely have stuck around to 100% everything if it weren't for the fact that the game requires you to grind to get enough magic stars and coins for all of the ability upgrades. And while finding most of the secrets in each level was satisfying, you're not told what the optional objectives are when you first start a stage, meaning that if you're gonna catch 'em all you have to play through most levels two to three times each, sometimes more if one of the objectives is to take out a mini-boss without getting hit, for example. I set out to do this but quickly found myself getting frustrated, which I took as my sign that I'd had enough.
Still, very enjoyable overall. Inventive, charming and often quite surprising, and, at about 17 hours on the clock, pretty generous, too. Perfect post-Elden Ring fare.
8/10
There have been lots of comparisons made with Mario Odyssey, and though those are definitely valid, in truth this feels as much an action game as it does a platformer, with a much bigger focus on combat than I could have predicted. The bosses which round out each biome require some positively Dark Souls-style dodging and bait-and-switching, while the anime madness and bombast of the final stages feel straight out of a Platinum game. At the same time, the fixed camera stages, all riddled with secrets and things to discover, put me in mind of Captain Toad.
I finished the game at 90% complete, including all the post-credits stuff, which provide a sort of greatest hits remix of the best parts from the stages in each of the biome and were good fun to run through again. I'd likely have stuck around to 100% everything if it weren't for the fact that the game requires you to grind to get enough magic stars and coins for all of the ability upgrades. And while finding most of the secrets in each level was satisfying, you're not told what the optional objectives are when you first start a stage, meaning that if you're gonna catch 'em all you have to play through most levels two to three times each, sometimes more if one of the objectives is to take out a mini-boss without getting hit, for example. I set out to do this but quickly found myself getting frustrated, which I took as my sign that I'd had enough.
Still, very enjoyable overall. Inventive, charming and often quite surprising, and, at about 17 hours on the clock, pretty generous, too. Perfect post-Elden Ring fare.
8/10