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Wow...
I absolutely hate this game. For those of you who have been complaining about the first few levels being too difficult, let me tell you... I can do the first few levels like a walk in the park, and the LAST 2 levels are just painful and cruel. The measure of my skill is that in the game I currently have open, I got to the second-to-last level with 1 death total, collecting 12 lives. I am on the last level with 3 lives left, which means I've died probably 15-20 times on the last 2 when you factor in new lives because of collecting those white things.
Where to even begin... start off with the LACK OF A SAVE FEATURE. This is just incomprehensible.
I'll make a list of the rest:
- Some platforms have edges that end a fair bit BEFORE where the platform appears to end, so you just fall off the edge the first time you see one of them
- There is no way to kill the floating spineballs. Game bug? Either way, it makes no sense whatsoever and makes some parts of the game a lot less satisfying
- The intro screens to levels don't wait for you to read them, and disappear too fast for you to read more than half of them. You either have to take a screenshot, or just play the level multiple times and read a different part of the intro each time.
- The levels are, in general, way too long. It guarantees that you will spend time playing the same thing over and over again before you get to the end of the level.
- The "kills" reporting at the end of each level is mystifying. It takes a lot of points off if you ever get hurt, even if you do everything else the same.
- The way to get past the first stage of the second-to-last level is nonsensical. You have to _roll_ into the stone wall, which causes it to collapse. Jumping or running into the wall has no such effect despite the fact that you're moving a lot faster.
- The collapsing platforms collapse much too fast--my guess is between a tenth and a twentieth of a second, since they collapse much faster than my reaction time which is somewhat more than a tenth of a second. It's just ridiculous, and though I've gotten used to them, they absolutely guarantee several deaths in the beginning.
- Sometimes you fall through the ground (just a bug)
- There's NO way to look beneath you. Another thing that makes no sense and hurts gameplay.
- In the last 2 levels, there do not seem to be any extra lives (besides lives from collecting white things). Maybe there's a hidden chamber somewhere, but at least on the last level, the only possible place for it would be at the other end of a blind flying leap into space.
- It's not at all clear how to kill the final boss. I've gotten three cracks at him, and what I've done is 1. shoot him 3 times with a spike, 2. jump onto his beak and then his head and dive bomb on the bump. I succeeded at this and still didn't win. AND this boss is at the end of probably the longest level in the entire game. What the hell do you do?? Throw spikes and hit the bump again, without dying? Sure... if I had 50 lives to spend.
More difficult is not always better. In this case it's just painful for no reason. I wager that nobody except the game creators and maybe a dedicated beta tester or two has ever beaten this game (... and it only counts if you play from the beginning like the rest of us), and that 99% of the people who started the game didn't make it to the last level.
In fairness, the game has its good points, such as the graphics and the gameplay feel, which are excellent--some people complained about the fact you can't turn on a dime, but you can just get used to that and it's good. But the hours of meaningless frustration needed to even get to the last level are _not worth it_.
