However, it's a janky mess that feels stiff and awkward. I really did, because Balan Wonderworld is a jazz-clad call back to the classics with oodles of Spyro and Mario inspirations, a charming JRPG aesthetic, and a wealth of beautiful set-pieces. balan wonderworld looks/sounds like something went particularly wrong in the management/direction for this title.I wanted to love this game. although they don't have a lot of fans, i had a good time with yoshi's new island and hey pikmin - even though they're pretty bog-standard 2d platformers. I wouldn't even lay this solely at the feet of arzest. Part of me thinks rodea was the final result of the air nights concept from the dreamcast era - maybe even going so far as to take in some of the level design concepts or pre-planning into the development of rodea. all his non-sonic stuff from the mid 90s-onward was generally well-received too, or at least had its own following, including let's tap, billy hatcher, ivy the kiwi?, and fishing resort. rodea was not a bad game - although naka probably had longer to work on it. Honestly surprised the reception so far from the demo is that the game is apparently flat-out bad. I have hopes that the Day 1 patch might actually be able to fix a few of these things, but we'll have to wait and see. Even the most charitable and nostalgic fans would find it charmingly awkward at best, so again I can only assume that they did it because a previous Sonic Team game did it without any real thought for how it would work in this game. The choice to use weird realistic mocap for characters with cartoony proportions decades after it already looked strange in Sonic Adventure 2 is just bizarre. A similar problem is seen with the health system - whereas Sonic's rings and NiGHTS' timer were clever alternatives to the typical "touch an enemy, lose a heart" mechanic and allowed you to keep moving after taking a hit without losing much, this game's attempt at doing something similar instead forces you to slow down and backtrack when you lose a costume so you can go get it back. Restricting the menus to also utilize those one-button controls almost feels like parody. The forced one-button controls clearly stem from a desire to harken back to the simple controls of Sonic and NiGHTS, but the devs have failed to realize this game is inherently way more complex than those games by design and thus shouldn't use the same control scheme. Possibly a complaint that's mitigated by the full game? The default character speed and jump are noticeably meager compared to other platforming characters, which I suspect is because they want you to use certain costumes to make up for those shortcomings. The lengthy costume switching animation is incredibly unnecessary for a game in which your main mechanic is swapping costumes. The core issues I see with the game are entirely down to intentional design choices, none of which seem like they'd be that difficult to fix. I disagree with this, people really want to liken this to a rushed 06-tier disaster but there's nothing in the demo that felt unfinished or broken.
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