I wasn't feeling this game at first, but I've gotten probably halfway through the game at the time of this review and felt compelled to drop what I was doing to state my thoughts. The level design is so great, there's so much you can do, so many fun secrets to find, so much shit to collect, and so much personality imbued in the animations and voice acting of the characters.
This is the kind of game that has that "oh my god, you can DO that???" magic to it. The kind of magic that makes you talk about the game with your friends at the playground, trading secrets that one of you found and not the other.
In the early game, a lot of the dragons you rescue just sorta regurgitate manual information or obvious stuff you could figure out on your own, and that's the part of the game that didn't sell me at first. The first few levels are a little too standard. But then, they start dropping level-specific hints that help you start to piece things together that aren't as obvious, and they start to get way more creative with the sort of things you can do in the levels.
Not every level is a winner, but after enjoying Cliff Town and Ice Cavern, and then High Caves blowing me away, I think it's cemented itself as one of my favorite 3D platformers of all time. My only real complaint is that the camera controls bugged me with no way to invert them (L2 turns the camera to show the right, and R2 turns left), and some of the jumps in this game aren't very forgiving. You fall kinda fast with the glide so they expect you to be at the very peak of your jump and jump right at the edge of a platform to make certain jumps. Otherwise, the game's fantastic.
This is the kind of game that has that "oh my god, you can DO that???" magic to it. The kind of magic that makes you talk about the game with your friends at the playground, trading secrets that one of you found and not the other.
In the early game, a lot of the dragons you rescue just sorta regurgitate manual information or obvious stuff you could figure out on your own, and that's the part of the game that didn't sell me at first. The first few levels are a little too standard. But then, they start dropping level-specific hints that help you start to piece things together that aren't as obvious, and they start to get way more creative with the sort of things you can do in the levels.
Not every level is a winner, but after enjoying Cliff Town and Ice Cavern, and then High Caves blowing me away, I think it's cemented itself as one of my favorite 3D platformers of all time. My only real complaint is that the camera controls bugged me with no way to invert them (L2 turns the camera to show the right, and R2 turns left), and some of the jumps in this game aren't very forgiving. You fall kinda fast with the glide so they expect you to be at the very peak of your jump and jump right at the edge of a platform to make certain jumps. Otherwise, the game's fantastic.