Recent reviews by Gilamex the Bunnicorn

And I collect a lot of weird games!

But don't let "weird" dissuade you. Bitsy Bits is a bizarre mashup of a bunch of different retro game inspirations. Half of the fun is playing it like an old game where you never read the instruction manual and you're just trying to figure stuff out. I'm heavily biased towards the "toy castle/living dollhouse" aesthetics, so that's mostly why I bought it. But upon some initial exposure to the gameplay, it's come out as something extremely unique! The sound effects and visuals are all so euphoric. When you're on a killing bouncing spree, it feels like you're on an acid high and you'll constantly find yourself asking "What is going on?!"

Below is every inspiration I noticed, as well as a description of the ingame mechanics that I've noticed so far in 3 hours of playtime. (Spoilered because, like I said, sometimes its fun figuring stuff out on your own!)

Mario Bros. 3 - The "Stageplay" aesthetic, curtains and all!
Mario Bros. 2 - The "uproot" mechanic as well as the quite obvious reference as you fall from the sky in the first stage.
Bubble Bobble - The general proportions/spritework is sort of reminiscent of this. Abilities bounce around in bubbles, and you have to defeat all the enemies to move on. Respawning puts you in a sailboat which I believe controls similarly to Bubble Bobble's respawn mechanic.
Kirby - Speaking of abilities, they can be picked up from enemies, boxes, the ground, anywhere! And you can store them in your inventory below.
Doom? - There's a little Bitsy face at the top of the screen that keeps looking around and making cute faces. As far as I'm aware, there's no reason for this to exist, but it's cute! And I'm sure other retro games besides Doom does this.
Even Smash Bros.?! - The white number next to the picture of Bitsy is your percentage meter (%). As you take hits, this number will go up. If it gets high enough, you'll find yourself getting flung around the stage until you fly off the top, sides, or bottom, causing you to lose all your hearts and lose a life. (Grab coins to lower this value.) You'll get KO's by knocking enemies off screen too. Once they're hit enough, they just go flying. Sometimes they fly into the background or foreground like Smash bros!
Hearts? - Yeah I've been playing for 3 hours and still can't tell what these do.
Nintendo DS: Sides of the Screen - The sides of the screen is probably my favorite thing, actually. While original arcade games having re-releases often show promotional art at the sides of the screen similar to the sides of an arcade cabinet, Bitsy's side "screens" actually have a use! They display the current goal, hints to progress, secret rooms, interesting mechanics (not spoiling this one!), character sprites, and dialogue in conversations. It's so wild what the developer is able to accomplish with such little space on the sides of the screen.

I only have two complaints;
Foreground? Background? - Sometimes its hard to tell what's in the background and what's able to be stood on in the foreground. But honestly I'll say its part of the aesthetic, you get used to it.
Music... - The music is a very strange choice. Although sometimes eargrating, the weirdness of it only adds to the strangeness of the game as a whole. I think the music alone helps to make it feel like one of those old arcade games with semi-obnoxious background music. It's really cute!

All in all, I can't get enough of this game and I thank the developer for introducing me to the strangely deep (lore!) and world this game has to offer. I would love to see either a sequel, or whatever else the developer comes up with next!
Easily the most magical game I've played. So cute!

If you think this is an animal-crossing clone with shop management as the core, you're dead wrong. It's ONLY a shop management game with a lot of lack of polish in certain areas. And with the fact it's labeled as a full game, I doubt they're going to update it enough to change the core formula.
The introductory discount persuaded me, but after playing for a few hours, the price felt pretty high for what I got. It's a cute game and I've played a few management games before, but this one feels incomplete despite it not being labeled as Early Access.

Unfortunately, it's just "cute" and that's where the fun ends. I like cute games, but I also like fun games.
- Items and tools feel janky to use. Nothing feels good to use. I have no idea what the hitboxes are for tool usage.
- The camera frequently bugs out whenever something goes in front of it, but resources can spawn behind objects and cliffs and you can't rotate the camera. So either lose out on resources or deal with a glitchy camera.
- Picking up items with a full inventory just deletes them? I've checked all of the storage locations in the game but the item doesn't show up there, despite it telling me I picked it up. So they just disappear??? I of course only noticed this after picking up what should have been a stack of logs, but wasn't. I assumed I had space because the game told me I was collecting it.
- When I remove shelves from inside the store, instead of refunding some of the cost or letting me store them as items to deploy later, it just deletes them and makes you waste money if you misplace one. Why...?
- And probably the biggest problem is that the island feels empty. NPCs can enter your store when you open it, and they have houses that they live in, but if they're not at your store, they simply don't exist on the island at all. It feels like a ghost town. Either your store is a bustling joint filled with the island's population or you take one step outside and it's just you and an abandoned island.
- The gameplay loop didn't hook me, it feels pretty barebones so I don't think I'm going to enjoy this for the rest of the playthrough. I got to the end of the tutorial (which is, yes, as people say, 2 hours long) and they didn't introduce enough to really spice things up. Gather resources, spam-craft a million items, sell them, unlock new recipes, repeat.

I don't want to sound too harsh. As I said, yes, it's cute, very cute. But that's quite literally it. Neither the controller nor keyboard controls felt good to use. It just... needs more time, I don't know. As I was playing it I kept thinking to myself "why am I continuing? What else is going to happen?" So I requested a refund before I'm locked into this experience that I potentially won't like. Personally, I wish Steam gave us more than 2 hours to play a game as you don't get a good enough taste in just 2 hours usually. But the fact that this game's tutorial takes up that entire time is making me worry if I'll enjoy what comes later, because like I said, personally, I don't see enough things to do in this game to keep it mechanically interesting.

My friend gifted me this game, and I was eager to play it. I'm always one to want to play new farm/life sims with combat in it. But god almighty this game has some serious issues that you just cannot grasp or fully understand from the screenshots or trailers. It's been a long while since I played it, and none of the updates have really grabbed me. In fact, its the frequency of updates with paid DLC that they're pushing out that's getting me to write this review in the first place.

Let me explain every good thing about the game that I can remember:
+ Has a few earworm soundtracks, the music is okay.
+ The artstyle is consistent and the sprites/items look good.
+ Character designs are... something, I guess?
It's a shame I can't remember many good things about the game because there's just so many BAD things about it. Nothing bad in this game outright makes it terrible by itself, its a coagulation of a million tiny--but impressively terrible--design choices.

One phrase can describe over half of the bad design choices in this game: RESOURCE SINK. They just do this to ARTIFICIALLY INFLATE the game's playtime.
- Gameplay loop is boring as hell. Good luck getting anywhere in the story until you grind for 50 hours in the mine. Why? Because the gates you unlock as you progress will close the next day. Why? Because you need to craft keys to unlock them permanently. Why? RESOURCE SINK.
- Every single quest in this game is a fetch quest. They all want items only you can produce. Why? RESOURCE SINK.
- There are artificial barriers that prevent you from progressing until you give them the right items (appearently they're the developer's mascot or something? That's pretty egotistical.) Why? RESOURCE SINK. They also reappear every season. Why? [/b]RESOURCE SINK[/b].
- Literally the only quests that progress the story are "gather 2,000 of X" or "gather 12,000 of Y". These are not numbers I'm making up. Why? RESOURCE SINK.
- Lategame, to get to the last city, there are 4 ♥♥♥♥♥♥ ROADBLOCKS that halt your progress for NO REASON. God, talk about "Borderlands syndrome". Two of which require you to go and "gather" something because that is literally the only way the developers can think of to let you progress. Why? RESOURCE SINK.
- Crafting certain things are rediculously expensive for literally zero reason. The most basic recipe you'll be crafting a million of are storage chests. One chest cost 20 planks. Each plank is worth 2 logs. Each tree drops about 2-5 logs in the early game, meaning you have to chop down 10 freaking trees for a tiny little chest. Why??? RESOURCE SINK. Which, by the way, in my current playthrough I have about 20 chests because the game has a pretty bad storage system. I basically had to entirely wipe my farm clean of trees TWICE, JUST for chests. Mind you, there are PLENTY of other recipes that require logs that you'll need to craft.
- Good god the end game. Like Satisfactory; what do you get when you reach the end of a game that requires you to RESOURCE SINK for no reason? RESOURCE SINK until the end of time, of course! This might be spoilery if you care, but here are the actual legitimate numbers straight from the wiki itself: This[sun-haven.fandom.com] is what they expect you to cough up if you choose to go the pacifist route in this game. These numbers probably mean nothing to you unless you know how painful it is to gather even a single one of these.
- And if RESOURCE SINKING isn't your jam, this game's got all sorts of other terrible design decisions! Like why oh god why is the combat so terrible what in the world... Honestly the only thing that needs to be changed is hitboxes and "time to strike" or whatever you call the timing of actually dealing damage during animations. As it stands, if an animation starts to play, that entity will deal damage no matter when in the animation it hits you. (A common indie game dev mistake, for some reason.) And the hitboxes are... Oh god, what am I, part of the atmosphere?! You will literally land hits you should not be able to, and be hit when you shouldn't. Literally no better way to describe this than: "What the literal ♥♥♥?! I was NOWHERE NEAR that!". I actually am making a formal request here to the developers to allow players to enter debug mode and display the hitboxes. I actually need to know, and you should too. Like a Rosetta Stone, we can't understand a foreign language that you choose to speak to us in until you give us the tool to translate it. Now, you'll get used to the jank eventually, but this literally is just badly designed combat, this is not an accident. It has to be intentional. If it was an accident I swear it would have been fixed by now. This kind of a change is so easy and goes such a long way. And please don't give me that "Oh but combat isnt the focus", I don't care. If you're going to make half of the game farming and half of it combat, that is STILL HALF OF THE GAME.
- No form of proper fast travel. You have about 4 points you can fast travel to once you have every area unlocked. And each fast travel point is not only traveled to by reaching a different point in order TO fast travel, but requires a different currency to go to... Why? RESOURCE SINK. (What I mean by "requires reaching a different point", is that this game's definition of """fast""" travel is a Mario warp pipe system. Yet, each pair of warp pipes have their entry and exit pipes in terrible, inconvenient locations except for like, 2. I'm convinced at this point that if a game is going to have fast travel in this day and age at all, it MUST be usable from anywhere by just clicking on a location from the world map.)
- Could be personal taste, but this game also has one of my biggest pet peeves in crafting games; CRAFTING TIMERS. And they are SLOOOOOOOW. Some recipes require several ingame hours to craft just ONE. And you're gonna need HUNDREDS of these things to make money. Why? RESOURCE SINK, but not of resources this time, but TIME ITSELF. Again, artificially inflate the game's playtime. There will be many times in your playthrough where you'll just be sitting around waiting for no reason.
- Your character is a weakling and can't stay up past midnight for some reason. Why? I dunno. They pass out and go to the HOSPITAL. Like damn dude are you /that/ sleep deprived that passing out sends you to the emergency room? This is more relatable than my life as a college student. Not only that, but you have to pay gold for... the hospital's... services...? ...Okay. Sure lol. In my opinion, and from my experience playing other life sims, this is just a lame excuse for the developers to "close the curtains" on any given ingame day so they can "set the scene" for the next day and load the assets properly. Rune Factory 3 and 4 does "pulling an all-nighter" the best I've seen. Because those developers probably know how to properly load the next day's assets without a blatant loading screen that breaks your immersion. (Garden paws also uses a loading screen, and yeah it breaks your immersion).
- And if you've made it this far, well let me tell you FINALLY we get to talk about the DLCs. Well, they're all cosmetic. Which is nice and all. But why are they charging this much for them?? I saw a comment saying an upcoming DLC is going to be 15 bucks. What??? I know, you need to fund your game for the long run, but this is not the way to do it. I think 25 bucks is a fair price for what's in the box (content-wise, if you can put up with all these negative points I've mentioned thus far), so unfortunately I'm unsure how to monetize the game myself. All I know, is you're locking a significant amount of content behind a paywall at this point, cosmetic or not..

Apparently I've hit the character limit so this is all I can post lol.

Obviously ignoring the much-needed polish, it seems promising.

Survivor Log Day 1: I built an arcade machine out of wood and it sucked me into another dimension where I got to shoot a bunch of menacing paper lanterns.

I swear this is trying to steal the spotlight from Palworld as it has MANY similar elements, but that game isn't even out yet so maybe that's why this game feels so rushed. It's also a mobile port but plays okay on PC, just a bit janky.

• So, let me just say, yes, I've played Undertale. No, I did not like it. Long story short, the communication between what the developer wanted and how the player was supposed to do that thing was nonexistent. Luckily, that's not the case for Everhood.
  
• If you're thinking of buying this because "Oh, it looks like Undertale", then you might be disappointed. That's all I'll say to avoid spoilers. Let's say I'm glad it decided to be on the contrary. It was a bold move.

What should I expect from this game?

• Three endings. For you Undertaler's, "genocide", "pacifist", and a "secret" ending. However, I must warn you, to do pacifist, you must beat the game first, then play it again. I'll happily help you achieve any of these endings. Just ask for help in the comments here, or on my profile. Some are harder to do.
  
• Wacky characters. From a crazy scientist to talking lampposts. From a slime that likes to play DND to a mysterious trash can monster. From a mischievous mage who loves playing tricks to a bunny and goldfish that never speak. You're guaranteed to find at least 5 characters that you love, if not all of them.
  
• Great music. Of course this had to be here. I went in expecting Undertale-level music. Well... it's not. I'm not saying the music is bad, it's just different than Undertale's. Rather than it being a bunch of good songs in the same style, the game instead focuses on making a song for just about every genre, for each encounter. Some are way better than others, while some characters don't even really have "songs", but rather just beats. Yet, the few lackluster songs that play match up with how dorky the characters are that they play for. This is a good thing because it matches their personality and style. This being said, however, I plan on buying the soundtrack regardless because of the few really, really good songs within it.
  
• An original battle system. Yeah, it's uh... Guitar hero meets an RPG. The combat is all real-time and rhythm based. Each encounter has a different pattern, set of projectiles, and mechanic you have to learn. My only problem with the combat being advertised as "rhythm based" is the fact that, since the BEATS themselves are what create the projectiles, they take a certain amount of time to cross the screen and reach you, therefore meaning YOU must react to a DIFFERENT rhythm. There's no way around this, really. If it was designed with the projectiles coming to hit you to the beat, the characters would send them at you ahead of time and be out of sync with the music, making it more confusing. Rather, when a character sends out projectiles to the beat, you have to think ahead a few beats and replicate that pattern. It's hard to explain in text.
  
• Absurd difficulty and challenging achievements. Not much to say about this. Undertale made a few fights difficult, but my god, nothing compares to Everhood. Even on the lowest difficulty, it still doesn't lower the amount of projectiles fired at you. I played on Hard (the default, and 2nd highest) and two bosses in particular I had been stuck on for a few good hours or so. BE PREPARED.
  
• CUSTOM BATTLES! You read that right. Though it requires significant knowledge of Unity and the game's tools, but you can...
  
  1. Set custom sprites/animations/models for the enemy you face off against.
     
  2. Set custom music to go along with it.
     
  3. Set up what types of projectiles appear, when they appear, and how many.
     
  4. I'm unsure about this since I haven't dabbled enough yet... BUT, you might even be able to have certain screen distortion effects similar to story mode fights if you're good enough with Unity. I just haven't tried or seen any like that yet.
• Quite an emotional journey... Somehow this game managed to grip me not only faster, but much harder than Undertale did. And for a much longer time. Undertale grabbed me with a gentle grasp that I quickly slipped and fell out of and hit the floor. This game grabbed me by the neck, nearly choked me, shot off into the sky with me, sent me hurling through the starry cosmos like a rainbow comet and came crashing down into another plane of reality with me in its cradling arms, telling me how much it loved me, and how much this journey was meant for me specifically, me and me only. I just love trippy games, but this one felt so tailor-made for such a niche audience, and I'm always front-row-and-center in that kind of audience. Not only were the characters lovable and almost all relatable (this is coming from an introvert...), but I love when a choice must be made, no matter the consequences. I love playing the hero, doing things for the greater good, even if it means holding out until the bitter end... Then, the game reaches its hand out and pulls you up from the deep end of the pool, and asked if you felt alright afterwards.

What was your personal experience with the game?
I never got stuck anywhere. I loved every step of the journey. Unfortunately, I REALLY don't want to spoil you anything, so I can't say much else. I'll just say that this is exactly what I was hoping Undertale would be. I didn't buy this game thinking "Oh it looks like Undertale so let's get it for a Undertale 2". I bought it because I thought to myself "Well Undertale fell super flat for me, so let's see if this can be what I expected from it." And it was exactly that.

Thanks for scrolling all the way to the bottom! There's so much I want to say about this game but just... can't. I refuse to spoil games for people. If you'd like, comment on my profile and tell me you read my review for Everhood! If you've played it, I'd love to talk about it and stuff! I personally love anything related to drug-induced visuals, anything trippy or spirituality-related. Not only are they pretty to look at, but they're so interesting to look at from a creative perspective. "How did this person come up with this stuff?" I always ask. I love rainbows, colors, trippy scenes, distortions, anything that makes you go "whoa" as well as anything related to reality, the cosmos, and all that spirituality jazz. I may have drifted away from religion as a person, and I feel bad for it, like I'm leaving behind an old friend, but it's not because I got bored of them, it's because I felt happier being involved in something they didn't want to be a part of. I was willing to break that connection in order to experience... well, what so few people can experience simply because it requires courage to do so. Playing this game until the end was one of those experiences.

So I've been playing this almost nonstop since its release here on steam. It's exactly as weird as it sounds; farming mixed with roguelike action. But it strangely works. Really well. You adventure during the day, defend your crops at night. Kills get you fertilizer which you use to boost your crops' worth (took me way to long to realize fertilizer makes your crops worth more, not just grow faster). There's 10 "years" to play through, each one being a harder difficulty than the last. One run = one year. Each year is 4 seasons and each season is 3 days (a boss on day 3) and each day is only about a minute and a half lol. Runs go quickly. I'll go over my points below;

The good:
- Fun soundtrack that I never get tired of, real silly sounding.
- Graphics are very stylized and everything looks like they go together, nothing stands out in a bad way, and I love the cartoony vibe (I love anything cartoony).
- Marriage wasn't needed, but they included it and I love it (though barebones, it's necessary for it to be simple in a game with runs that only last ~20 minutes each. You grow roses, give roses to people for items, eventually they'll give you their wedding ring that grants a buff, and the person will follow you around and do stuff. Same gender marriage too, so that's welcomed in my book!)
- Great diversity of threats based on biomes. (There's a biome in each direction. I recommend going like this: Left, right, then down or up, your choice. Don't buy bridge pieces until later in the run, because festivals (end-month progress checks) give you a piece for free.) (Tip: Biomes extend twice in each direction. The second-tier version of the biome having more difficult enemies of previous versions, and certain"camps" that you can clear to grand a permanent upgrade station back at the hub.)
- Great item synergy (two items that slow enemy projectile speeds, and when conditions are met to activate them both, bullets practically freeze in the air.)
- Fun selection of active, passive, and single-use items. (Tractors being a sort of "ultimate" ability is kinda funny to me. You hear radio chatter when your tractor is charge like it's some kind of military guy telling you the nuke is ready to launch lol)

I honestly can't think of anything mediocre or bad as of right now, I'll update this as the game gets updated.
(Dandelion is my favorite character. Hard to get used to at first, but really snowball-y.)

My wants for future updates:
1: More spouses (there's currently 5, you have to unlock 1 of them)
2: More characters to play (there's 5, you start with one and have to unlock the rest)
3: Perhaps make each character have a different starting weapon, and each weapon they start with be something that the other character cannot ever obtain, sort of like a "signature weapon", if you will.
4: More items.
5: More years and rewards for beating certain years.
6: The ability to hang out in your house back at the hub with whoever you marry the most, or perhaps just of your choosing (maybe an upgrade, purchase with cornucopias (the upgrade currency)).
7: Maybe a few more crop types, and much more opportunites to expand your farmable land (there's so much dirt you can till, but the game never gives you enough pickaxes (used to "break soil crust" so you can expand your till area) to even farm on a fraction of it.))
8: More bosses and perhaps enemies (I heard they were talking about this, still want to mention it anyway.)
9: Perhaps the ability to keep playing as your spouse if you die while married. Kinda sucks that when you die the run just ends, and your spouse stands there not even mourning over you lol. It would be a much bigger incentive to marry early, as it would be a type of "1-up" system.
- OR -
9.5?: The ability to play as any character AND spouse, and for anyone you don't select to show up as a potential spouse. I want this the most, probably.

Furryosa is best waifu and you can't tell me otherwise. She looks super soft and cuddly I love bunnies
Rue is cool too tho

Come on. I loved the first one so much. This one is so much better than the original in every single way... Except, well... I'll let anyone reading this know that you should watch out for 2 things (these things alone ruined the game completely for me) :

1: Everything in the world levels up as you do. Trainers, wild battles, bosses ESPECIALLY, everything. Oh but it's not based on your levels, no. It's based on how many fights you've won. Captured a level 10 and want to level him up later in the game? Too bad, everything around you is now level 33 and that level 10 is literally useless, even if you go back to the first area in the game; everything's level 33.

2: DO NOT level only one nexomon up. DO NOT focus on one character and let him carry you. Why? Well, that tactic works for about half the game (way too well, I might add) BUT then the game suddenly throws you into an area where you have to fight 3 trainer battles in a row with no healing between them and no item usage. It doesn't matter if your nexomon is 23 levels higher than the opponents (that's how it was for me), they WILL destroy you because you can't heal him. It's like going against an army of 5,000,000 ants. They each don't do hardly any damage to you, but the sheer longevity of the fight to kill each one drains your nexomon to where they WILL eventually faint (I tried 3 times with various core combinations (cores are items that change your nexomon's stats, and can be interchanged on the fly) but I just CANNOT proceed past that battle sequence. "Well why don't you level up the rest of your party?" Read the previous point. Because I captured the rest of my party so early in the story, I now can't level them up at all. Also, the game doesn't have EXP share as an item otherwise I WOULD USE IT. The first game had it, but this one? Nope. I heard they plan on adding it eventually, so until they do this will remain a negative review simply because the developers don't allow for my playstyle until I reach a certain point in the game in which they then PUNISH you for playing that way and get you softlocked 20 hours into a playthrough.

No, I am NOT making another save file and starting over. This is just bad game design. I will swap this review if they can simply do two things:
1: Add exp share. Some of us don't want to spend hours levelling up our entire party (Seriously, I spent 20 hours levelling up a single nexomon and I'm not even halfway through the game. I don't know how you people can level up an entire party. ESPECIALLY with...)
2: REMOVE THE RUBBERBANDING ENCOUNTERS. I don't know what else to call it, but the thing where the world levels up as you do. Developers, let me give you a hint: There is a reason no other RPG has done this before; it's because IT DOES NOT WORK. If you're not going to remove it COMPLETELY, then add an option to DISABLE IT. I have nothing against it being in the game, just do not make it MANDATORY. To me; the more options a game has, the better, even if I don't use them all because I understand some people might like it that way.

Wow this was really cool. Upon some (very brief) research, it turns out this is a PC "port" of a GBA game by the same name. That's why the graphics, sound, and everything felt so... oddly familiar to me. I had not played the original, mind you.

I LOVE the artstyle of the characters. Graphics were great, music was awesome, characters were all super adorable and nothing in the game ever felt too frustrating (except some bosses).


Your moveset:
Besides moving left and right and having a basic jump, you can duck and press an attack button. There's some intricacies here though that are quite interesting. For example, if you hold "down" in the air, you'll flip upside down and bounce on your ears to reach greater heights. You can then attack while in this state to do a sort of drill move (I honestly forgot you could to this during boss fights and thus never used it. Mainly because hit detection is too generous for the enemies to hit you so you can never get too close to them.) You can also keep pressing the attack button to widen its range around you, as well as pressing the button repeatedly in the air to spin and glide. Pressing and holding the attack will charge up an attack with super far range (I just spammed this on most bosses as they were too hard to get close to, like I said.) It was super fun pairing the ear bounce with air spins, I felt surprisingly maneuverable. Oh you can also grab a flight "power up" and climb pipes.

What are "Mini Bros."?
Think of them like pokemon but as a passive/active ability. You'll find them in levels (only about 3/4 levels have them). You can "evolve" them by letting them listen to music(?) by purchasing music discs from the shop. The genres are rock, reggae, and classical. Think of giving the mini bros. music as feeding them. Once they listen to the right genre (it's trial and error), they'll change forms. The discs are the only thing to spend your money on, so just constantly buy them and give them to your mini bros. Some mini bros do things like giving you a shield to block one hit, give you another hit point back, attack in front of you, act as a platform for you to stand on, give you invulnerability, or light up dark areas. However, a few of these mini bros. are mandetory to get, though they are extremely easy to find. You can find them (and the objective) by using your radar ears, so you'll never get lost (the levels are small anyway).

Positives:
+ I liked the idea of switching Mini Bros to use different abilities. Gives it almost a pokemon-like vibe. (Some much more overpowered than others.)
+ Levels were easy and short (normally ~2 minutes each), and few of them reward exploration with max health upgrades and mini bros. to make levels or bosses easier.

Negatives:
- The bosses, man. You're agile, but not sonic or mario agile, quite. It's very difficult to fight bosses when half of them move faster than you and your vision is limited due to the small screen of the GBA. Some of them ramp up to having 20 health while you only have 5 (with two max health upgrades, even. You normally would only have 3.)
- I thought it was kind of annoying that once you "fed" a mini bro a certain disc they would change and REMOVE the previous mini bro evolution. Sometimes they changed abilities entirely (one mini bro just made health regen better and better with each evolution, however others replaced abilities entirely like invulnerability changing into "freezing enemies"???). This meant that once you evolved a mini bro and weren't happy with their new ability, you had to go back to a previous level to grab the first evolution again. Not that big of a hassle since you can exit the level via the menu as soon as you grab them, but was still annoying to have to backtrack because we didn't know what new ability they'd gain.

The in-between:
~ The game has a weird obsession with time-based levels. There's at least 5-7 levels that are on a time limit. I only failed once, and that was on the first "cosmorider" level they set you on where you have to drive by and pick up remotes. They don't explain where they are, so I missed the first one and failed. But other than that, the time limits are extremely generous. (There's a 10 minute level that you should end with about 4 to 5 minutes remaining.)

I honestly NEED to see more of these characters. I want more games with them in it. This was such a treat. They're so adorable and the moveset is so strange yet fun and new to me (I'm not an expert platformer and have only played few platformer games (some mario, a good amount of kirby and sonic and that's kinda it.)

I swear I had written a review for this game before, but okay, Steam. Here goes one now.

Perhaps I'm writing this review based on a personal experience, but take it as you may.

I bought this game back when it was in Early Access. At the time, it was one of the few games I was actually excited for in Early Access because I had hope for it (another title I love to death is 7 Days to Die, but unlike this game, that game is actually going places). This game would receive a few updates every now and again, but nothing huge or really all that special. Let's get into what made me not recommend this game.

1: I bought this game for 30 bucks (at the time, was full price, no sale or anything). Looking at the "price" of the game now, you can tell why I'm mad.
2: The game seemed to be in a fairly early stage with tons of bugs, insanely unbalanced enemies a super confusing "tier" system, and just about every animation needed some serious work. One day, I checked the store page to see if they posted anything new (I like to do this to games for some reason). The "early access" banner was gone from the page. Out of curiosity, I played it to see what they changed. The game was the exact same it was the update before they "released" the game. The game is still in an early-access-like state, that I feel the devs abandoned just because they got tired of working on it and said "screw it, just drop it as a full release so we can stop updating it". I'm sorry if I'm incorrect, but this is really what it felt like to me.
3: Um. Multiplayer is appearently gone now? Why? How? I thought the way I played with a friend was via LAN/Hamachi. Why does a drop of server support suddenly deny us the ability to play it locally like we used to? Did we never used to be able to play it locally? I swear I did at some point... Well that's a huge disappointment.

This is a perfect example of why not to support early access games, or at LEAST what NOT to do when developing your own early access game. Seriously, listen to the players and your game will be much more loved. As the saying goes "the customer is always right". Here's my positives and negatives based on when I last played the game (which, was a while ago because I could care less to play it now):

The Good:
+ Soundtrack. The title screen song is one of my favorites of any game. The song that plays for the plains biome is also super beautiful.
+ Customizability. (Is that a word?) You can make your own weapons and vehicles by placing these tiny cubes of different materials to literally make any 3D shape you want (think Cube World but with better graphics and smoothing). Based on what materials you use to build it in the blueprint editor, that then gets put into the recipe requirements. You can attach seats, thrusters, etc. Nothing I've ever build worked as I'd like to (lol at the vehicles...) but it's a cool concept I guess.

The Bad:
- Animations need some serious work. Looks very strange half of the time and other animations are extremely basic.
- Balance system is absolute trash. Enemies have levels, but you can't actually tell what level they are, like Skyrim. However in Skyrim, if you get hit by something out of your level, you might take 50% of your health in damage, letting you know you're not supposed to be there. Well in this game, enemies 1-shot you if they're 1 tier above you (I believe there's 5 or 6 tiers), once you die you drop everything, making it impossible to get your items back if you die in a high-level area by accident, and there is literally NO directions as to how to increase your level/tier of your armor and weapons. What I've found works (though I can bet $1,000 it's not supposed to be the right way) is by going into a dungeon that is 1 tier higher than you, doing your best to outrun everything in the dungeon, loot-ninja the chests and grab the recipes, then escape without dying. Congrats, you now have one or two recipes for weapons or tools you don't even want to use (maybe they aren't the playstyle you want to play). Now just do that about 8 times to get a full set of armor and a weapon of the next tier, and then do THAT about 5 more times to get all the tiers. No.

The Ugly:
~ Released as a "full release" while it obviously felt like it needed serious work, making the game just feel like it was abandonded.
~ Removal of multiplayer. I still can't even comprehend the reasoning behind this, as I swear I was able to play with my friend without needing to connect to an official server... I just want to know how the heck someone can even think to do this to a game and think it's okay/the best move they can make. Ugh.
~ Making it free to play. Really?! I paid $30 full price for this back in the day and now it's just free for literally no reason. I have no more to say about this matter. (Games go free to play pretty frequently, but every single one of them have MULTIPLAYER).

I'm sorry if this seems like a rant, devs. I really loved this game. I wanted to see it improve. What happened? 7 Days to Die is now left alone in a spotlight on the center stage for me, waiting to see what happens to it. It's been in development for 6 years since 2013, and not a single thing the devs have done to the game has been something I didn't like. Every single sneak-peak of the next update gets me so pumped to get back into the game again. And it's not like I even stop playing it, I play it a ton even in a drought between updates. This game had huge potential and... I'm just so sad. It's like watching an old friend die, but not completely die because they're still there in your memories and in some kind of physical form like an object they once owned, but then to have that object defiled, yet still be intact. It's just insult on top of insult. Maybe that's too harsh since I know developing games takes a lot of effort, but I'm just genuinely confused by just about every decision that was made during this game's devlopment process.

I hear talk of a PE2? If such a thing exists/is in development, man am I excited. Please don't let all of this happen to that game, too. Please show us you can redeem yourselves. If such a game is in development, I can't wait to play it, whether or not it's in early access (or maybe not. We'll see.).

(I received this for free from a friend.)
Literally fixes the ONLY problem I had with the first game:
Since the first game was 2D, you could easily get cornered and could NOT pass enemies without taking damage, and any amount of damage late into the game would 1-shot you. Think about that for a moment.
Well now they've added the Z axis and completely reimagined the game's art style in new gorgeous cell-shaded goodness. I was not a fan of the first game, since I beat it in 5 hours with a lucky run and didn't feel the need to play it again. This game... This is different. For some reason, I keep coming back to it, despite having it 100%'d every time it gets updated.

Positive
+ Since it's a rogue-lite/like (I consider those the same thing), there's a bunch of items.
+ The items are INFINITELY STACKABLE. Glasses that give you 10% crit chance = Pick up 10 of them, got 100% crit chance. An item that gives you an extra jump in mid-air = Use a 3D printer to turn your other items into it so you can jump 20 times and literally fly. Or an attack speed item that gives +15% attack speed = Grab as many as you can. You're gonna need em.
+ Each character/'survivor' has a vastly different fighting style, easily catering to anyone who's into these kinds of games. You're guaranteed to find someone you like (I like MUL-T, Engineer, REX, and Mercenary. A tanky robot with a built-in sniping weapon and minigun and can hold two useable items, a guy who builds turrets which inherit your items' stats, a lifestealing spiderbot who's abilities cost HP, and a melee assassin who's insanely mobile).
+ Lore! ...if you care about that kind of stuff. I don't, personally, but I find it fun to read some of the little snippets of info in the log book every now and again to hear about how certain items came to be (some of the descriptions aren't done yet).
+ Challenging. Honestly, only some players with good reactions and decision making abilities might enjoy this. Unlike all other roguelikes, this one doesn't really end (for now), so you'll die. A lot. (You can end your run at an optional area that appears every now and again to get rewarded with a special currency that stays with you through all your runs, but I don't count that as the end of the game since you can access it pretty early into a run).
+ Music. Eeehhhh I prefered the level's themes before the Scorched Acres update (the devs added a bunch of guitar riffs to 'make it sound more like the first game', but it just makes the songs sound like they're trying way too hard to be cool). But they're still good.
+ Few enough types of enemies to keep their abilities/'what they do' easy to remember, but enough enemies to keep you distracted from the fact that there's so few types of enemies. (On top of regular enemy types, they can spawn as upgraded versions later on in your runs, like with a fire afterburn effect to their attacks, or an ice version that'll slow you and explode when killed, or electric ones who have massive shields, or the newest type 'malachite' which stops you from healing).

Negatives
- Well, I sat here and thought for a good long while, and the only thing I could think of is 'lag in multiplayer'. It's not consistent. Sometimes when playing with a friend, he'd be lagging to hell and back and as soon as that run's over, we'd do another one and it'd be totally fine. It's strange because it seems to be completely random when it occurs, and when it does, it stays for the whole run, sometimes causing people to disconnect. This wasn't a problem prior to the most recent update, so I wonder if that has something to do with it...

It's definitely WAY more fun with friends, but you will NOT get bored when playing by yourself (I'm someone who likes co-op games over any over genre, and yet 90% of my progress made with unlocking items in this game is from playing it alone).