Recent reviews by Sylnic

I just finished beating the main story of the game with just over 9 hours put into it. Overall, this game is good! The platforming + grappling mechanics feel great, which is the number one thing to nail in a game named "Grapple Dog". The characters + visuals are charming, the music is a jam, and the environments all look solid. That said, I do have some gripes that ended up detracting from my fun with it:

- The collectibles detract from the game more than they add sometimes. While I like difficult collectibles, I feel they’re difficult for the wrong reasons in this game. The purple gems aren't immediately clear where they are, and that's fine, they're supposed to be hidden. But there's no way to move the camera around to look at offscreen areas, making you risk your life points + berries to search for gems sometimes, and that becomes frustrating when it causes you to restart a checkpoint. It also becomes frustrating when levels frequently cut you off from backtracking, so you're forced to play through the level again if you want to find those gems. Finally, when you do replay a level to find gems you missed, the gems won't count as collected until you complete the level, forcing you to play through entire levels again when you miss a gem. All of this really detracts from the fun of collecting them, and while I want to collect them to unlock the bonus levels at the end of the game, I don’t find myself super enthused to do it right now.

- I think for the most part the difficulty curve was fine, but it does jump around sometimes. The 4th world boss was more difficult than the final boss imo, and the creatures in world 3-3 + 5-2 that follow you around are really frustrating. I definitely think the 3-3 bonus world really shouldn’t be that early in the game. I know there were other worlds that felt weirdly harder or easier than I expected, though I can’t remember which ones specifically at the moment.

- The grapple mechanics feel great, though I have 2 minor gripes with them:
1. The lock on system doesn’t feel so great sometimes. I feel like if I shoot a grapple and it lands on an enemy or balloon without first locking on, it should connect. But it doesn’t unfortunately and just passes through them. This was annoying in some quick thinking moments where I end up whiffing grapples that appear to go straight through enemies/grapple points.
2. Being forced to break a grapple swing to attack enemies doesn’t feel good imo. Really breaks up the platforming momentum. I feel like the ability to do a timed attack while swinging would make a lot of sense, but I realize that changes some challenges.


That’s about all my negatives about the game, but this game really was fun to play! I think this game truly shines in its platforming + grappling mechanics, so I’m really looking forward to the bonus levels as well as the time trials. I’m currently *not* looking forward to collecting the remaining gems, but I like the game enough that I’m still gonna do it. I might come back and update this when I finish doing all that.

So yeah, overall I recommend it for people who like precision platformers.

This game is sick. Sword cat is sick.