This game is laughably horrible in every single aspect of its design.
The basic arrow-keys based movement system is unresponsive, and when it does let you move, the character often gets stuck on unseen obstacles. The sprites look good, but change at all the wrong times, which causes the character to humorously levitate while standing still and glide across the ground without moving his feet an inch.
Less funny are the objects' hitboxes, which are grossly out of proportion with their respective sprites' sizes. The skeleton archer in particular is huge -taller than half of the room- which makes bypassing it nearly impossible. If you do end up touching an enemy, your health vanishes almost instantly and you are forced to start over. Also, the enemies' projectiles are far larger than they appear, which makes dodging an unrealistic prospect.
The enemies themselves look diverse, but have the same exact behavior save for their rate of fire. To make matters worse, the A.I only knows how to face left and shoot, while occasionally moving in any direction at random. This makes each level feel identical, albeit more difficult than the last.
Of course, the increase in difficulty does not translate into a more engaging challenge. Instead, each level becomes more irritating than the last due to a constantly diminishing supply of crates. In the first level, crates appear every 10 seconds or so, which doubles by the final battle. Also, you will need at least 195 boomerangs to win this battle. This means that the player must spend a MINIMUM of 8 minutes collecting crates, all while avoiding enormous projectiles from four identical enemies that you have already fought several times each.
Overall, Brave Jungle Kid fails to be remotely entertaining in any way. While its art is nice, the gameplay, level design and lack of polish remove every bit of fun from the game.
P.S. Some additional problems that should be fixed:
- The crates will sometimes spawn on the border of the room, where you can't reach them.
- The level select screen is confusing; the buttons should be in rows and each level should be numbered.
- The crates don't give any cues when they are about to disappear.
- Boomerangs that you collect in one level carry over to the next. This lets the player stock up during the first fight and fire constantly for the remainder of the game.
- Going to the main menu erases all of your progress.