Oh man, I was really psyched to play this game as it gives a great first impression from recreating classic retro arcade vibes so accurately...but I unfortunately ended up feeling really let down!
There certainly is a lot of craftmanship on display here and I do think that, in a vacuum, it's a pretty neat arcade game with a lot of pizazz to it. But I couldn't help but be flabbergasted when, upon completing the first level, the second level was exactly the same as the first! It doesn't even stop there, as the third and fourth are the same as well too!
I can understand having the same general level layout recycled a few times, but you need to shake things up someway to give a sense of progression and spicy variety! You know, change the location of the doors and powerups and enemy spawns, increase enemy density, decrease amount of powerups, and for gods sake, change the AI! I was going crazy with the way the game kept giving me deja vu: every level it was watching the mouse and porcupine come down the elevator and go to the right, then the roach comes down and goes to the left, and then the bee, over and over and over, it's the same damn pattern every time! What's the point in playing!
Yes, eventually it does shake things up by introducing a bonus level and finally changing the level layout with something new afterwards, but it takes way too long to do so, and on any other day, I would've quit before getting to that point, safe in my assumption that the game just keeps looping the first level forever!
It didn't help either that the difficulty of the game felt very strange as well: powerups seemed to be in too generous of a supply and made it too easy to clear the board of all threats. The only difficulty of the game was the fact that it doesn't give you a good signal to let you know when your powerup is about to run out, such as through blinking.
I also wasn't a fan of the controls in some instances. For example, I disliked how delicate you need to be when going into elevators, having to come to a full stop and then hitting up after waiting a moment: feels very unresponsive and awkward. Why can't I just hit up when I'm running past an elevator to get into it smoothly, similar to how I can close doors by hitting the button when running past them? There's also a weird bug where you can get stuck on stairs, and the way your forward momentum is immediately killed when you jump and touch a wall is super annoying, especially in the bonus stage.
So yeah, unfortunately, this feels like a real case of style over substance for me: it looks pretty, but the gameplay just isn't fun and is incredibly repetitive. As a big fan of games like Mappyland and Tapper and Burger Time and so on, this should've been right up my alley! But that's all the more reason I'm so critical of it in failing to live up to them.