Reasonably fun 3D platforming romp with some pretty memorable peaks, but feels like it stumbles at trying to be a good time trialler. As someone who has played exactly one time trial game in my life I am here to unload my infinite wisdom and genre knowledge to tell you exactly what the problems are with this game
- Ace medals seem weirdly easy, a ton of levels I scored the ace first try and was kind of just confused when I saw it. But it's definitely not me skill-gapping the game (as much as I'd love to say it is) because there were still a fair few levels I didn't ace, and others I sat and chipped away at for a while. I've heard there are author medals but since the game never even hinted at their existence, I think they effectively won't exist for a majority of players (i.e people who don't immerse themselves in neon white fandom or don't grind the game enough to accidentally get one). A lot of the game's meat gets lost when I don't feel like I have a reason to replay a majority of the levels.
- A lot of levels seemed really linear, with very limited or no room for improvement outside of just improving your line (in the context of what the game actually expects of you, which is scoring aces - I'm sure the actual speedrunning crowd managed to tear this whole game wide open). These levels only really offer movement micro-optimisation, which can still be fun, but feels a bit lacking when the game's movement options are clearly more built to emphasise larger shortcuts and skips.
- Seemingly no reason to actually go fast? Getting medals makes your "neon rank" (i forgot what it's called already sorry) improve and I don't really know what that does or if it matters for anything. After I beat the final level I had a dialogue choice where one option was locked and idk if that was because I didn't ace every level or because I didn't participate in the dating sim part of the game (yeah) but it didn't exactly encourage me to clean up the rest of the aces to find out. TrackMania games lock progression behind scoring well enough within each set of levels, which I think is a good way to do it - it's leneint at the start so it might take a while until you're forced to grind out times, but it *will* hit you eventually.
- For a game that's ostensibly about speed, you sure do love slowing me down to try to make me read your story. You do get to fast-forward through it (instead of just skipping), but it still takes a while to get through because surprisingly there's a pretty hefty lot of dialogue in this game.
I want to make it clear that I don't dislike this game at all, and I think especially near the tail end of the game it had some really fun levels to blow through (if they made a standalone game just with book of life I would eat that shit up in a heartbeat, those levels had the most unreal sense of flow maybe more than any platformer I've played). I just think it's a little lacking in what should be its biggest strength.
- Ace medals seem weirdly easy, a ton of levels I scored the ace first try and was kind of just confused when I saw it. But it's definitely not me skill-gapping the game (as much as I'd love to say it is) because there were still a fair few levels I didn't ace, and others I sat and chipped away at for a while. I've heard there are author medals but since the game never even hinted at their existence, I think they effectively won't exist for a majority of players (i.e people who don't immerse themselves in neon white fandom or don't grind the game enough to accidentally get one). A lot of the game's meat gets lost when I don't feel like I have a reason to replay a majority of the levels.
- A lot of levels seemed really linear, with very limited or no room for improvement outside of just improving your line (in the context of what the game actually expects of you, which is scoring aces - I'm sure the actual speedrunning crowd managed to tear this whole game wide open). These levels only really offer movement micro-optimisation, which can still be fun, but feels a bit lacking when the game's movement options are clearly more built to emphasise larger shortcuts and skips.
- Seemingly no reason to actually go fast? Getting medals makes your "neon rank" (i forgot what it's called already sorry) improve and I don't really know what that does or if it matters for anything. After I beat the final level I had a dialogue choice where one option was locked and idk if that was because I didn't ace every level or because I didn't participate in the dating sim part of the game (yeah) but it didn't exactly encourage me to clean up the rest of the aces to find out. TrackMania games lock progression behind scoring well enough within each set of levels, which I think is a good way to do it - it's leneint at the start so it might take a while until you're forced to grind out times, but it *will* hit you eventually.
- For a game that's ostensibly about speed, you sure do love slowing me down to try to make me read your story. You do get to fast-forward through it (instead of just skipping), but it still takes a while to get through because surprisingly there's a pretty hefty lot of dialogue in this game.
I want to make it clear that I don't dislike this game at all, and I think especially near the tail end of the game it had some really fun levels to blow through (if they made a standalone game just with book of life I would eat that shit up in a heartbeat, those levels had the most unreal sense of flow maybe more than any platformer I've played). I just think it's a little lacking in what should be its biggest strength.