Team 17 – Pinkie's Paradise

Pinkie Played Monster Sanctuary : Pokémon ..but it’s a Metroidvania

My little lights! As you may have noticed.. or may not I have been using the term “Pinkie Plays” for my Let’s play style blogs! This one is titled Pinkie Played.. past tense! That is because this will be the format for my game reviews. I recently saw a let’s play of a game and I immediately fell in love with this game. It was a game called Monster Sanctuary. After completing the game… I am STILL in love with it. Oh Team 17 you made me one lucky moth.. I can destroy creatures and gather strength on my own! Happy days!

What is Monster Sanctuary?

Monster Sanctuary is a game published by Team 17, it was created by Moi Roi games and designer, Denis Sinner. If mister Sinner would fail as a game designer, he will always have a career in porn with a name like that. He might have to change the pronunciation of his first name a bit. Do I think he will ever need to go into porn?! Hell no! This game is whoops sitting meat. Scoring an 8.1 audience score and a 7.5 score on Metacritic with a very positive review rating on Steam, this game is sitting well. Myself would probably even rate it a smidge higher than the Audience score.. at an 8.6 or 8.7 or so. Monster collecting games in general review a bit lower than most of their peers because there is also a lot of hate for the genre. People who know this type of game isn’t for them to review it anyway in the hopes to burn it down and that is a shame. Because even if you aren’t a big Pokémon fan there is a lot to love here! With a 16 bit esthetic and the 2d exploratory platforming.. this is a monster collecting game like no other.

This game plays much more like Metroid than like Pokémon. Except there is no shooting. When you touch monsters, you engage in combat.. which is turn based and involves Monsters selecting their moves. These moves can either be magical or physical and belong to one of the four elements. (Air , Fire, Water and Earth). Some attacks can be neutral as well. Every enemy has a set of weaknesses and resistances you have to work around and explore. To a Pokémon fan it would feel as if 4 types aren’t enough but it is handled remarkably well.With very deep combat, that is also very easy and much more intuitive to grasp. Each monster can be examined before a combat round starts and weaknesses are always available to you.. so no need to learn all 101 monster’s typings and stats. This game makes collecting monsters more fun than in Pokémon. If you want to beat Pokémon you need to catch a decent team of 6, and while here you also battle with a squad of six, you are constantly encouraged to find the eggs of more monsters. That’s right, you do not capture monsters in this one.. you hatch them! You can gain eggs from random groups of monsters..by performing well in combat and using tactics and playing smart!

The reason why you need to capture more monsters is because there are plenty of monsters that offer you new ways to travel around the world. In the first area you might for example discover a small crevice you can’t fit through. Samus would use her Morphball to get through but since you do not have a fancy suit.. you will need to capture a Changeling that DOES morph you into a ball.. or cuter, a Rainbow Slime that can turn you into a slime. You might need a bird to hover to a treasure high above.. but your current bird can’t fly far enough. You might need to catch that derpy looking Dinosaur you saw flying in the other room.. but that one is hidden behind a switch with a lighting icon above it.. what monster do you need to activate THAT! While you can only train up 6 monsters at the same time you can travel with basically endless monsters so you can make sure you can use your favourite monsters to get past a certain obstacle. Wanna clean up . .you can always donate monsters to the army or bring some of the monsters you can not currently use to the farm. There are so many options!

What do you do in Monster Sanctuary?

In the game you take the role of a nameless Monster Keeper.. a Keeper is the word use for those who try to keep the Sanctuary safe by taming monsters. Humanity lives in a sheltered habitat that is called the Sanctuary and it’s many zones are inhabited by many monsters, that for the most part have been ..fairly friendly but recently the creatures have become a bit restless. As more Monsters of “Champion” Quality appear. It is the task of a Monster Keeper to defeat these Champion monsters before they can rile up the monster populus and make the area uninhabitable for humans. You play a boy or a girl, who is part of one of the four important bloodlines. There is the Bloodline of the Eagle, The Wolf, The Lion and the Toad. All belonging to a certain elemental bias. Such as the Eagle belonging to the Wind and Fire element. The Wolf of Water and Wind, the Lion of is Fire and Earth and the Toad is Earth and Water. I of course chose the toad.. why?! Well it’s a Toad that belongs to the grass element! That shall forever be my starter and my number 1.

The Journey starts with you traveling across the land , searching far and wide to find enough Champion monsters to increase your Keeper Rank so you can finally live up to your three rivals and your grandfather’s reputation. However you soon uncover that an evil organisation of Alchemists is trying to destroy the Monster Keepers. Performing all sorts of weird and unsanitary experiments with Alchemy. One name keeps popping up! Marduk, a leader of the Alchemist that supposedly has found a way to make himself immortal. Now he seems to have found a way to take away monsters that are bound to people and his motivations seem to be rooted deep in Monster Lore.. something evil is coming! You have to increase in rank faster than any Monster Keeper before you.. to stop whatever is hiding in the dark. Of course this is a retro style game so the story at times can feel a bit irrelevant.. but it is there and entertaining for those who choose to partake…but it is equally fun to go about and explore things on your own volition. Very little parts of the game are sealed behind linear progression, though you might wonder why you are hunting for a certain artifact in a new area if you do it all yourself.

The game counts 14 areas of which one works like a hub and safe house where you can shop, craft, get exposition and donate monsters to the army. Another one works as your post/game “bonus” content hub. Here you do things like challenging bosses you have defeated before to get greater rankings or fight against a series of challenging monster teams to see if you have truly mastered the game.. this area even has a room in which you can take your monster team online and battle other players. The other 12 areas are your basic Metroid like areas, in which you can find more monsters and sometimes items to explore terrain and overall find treasures and the likes. I only focussed on the story content part of the game and getting most of the monsters and I ended up putting about 30 hours in the game before reaching the end. I DID go out of my way to explore.. but I haven’t even scratched the surface off all the battle challenges, I have not done much of the postgame yet. This means the game for me is well worth it’s price of admission!

What is there to like about the game?

My response to the game is overwhelmingly positive. Let’s begin with the monster themselves. The games 101 monster count seems a bit lackluster at first, but when you realise that this game doesn’t really feature evolution that suddenly becomes a whole lot more impressive. Each monster is their unique thing.. except for the slimes there aren’t really any sprite swaps either. Only about 10 monsters evolve.. and in their cases it’s more like special ways to get a new monster, that require a specific monster and an item to create a new monster. Their designs can radically change so it really feels like there are 101 truly unique monsters. Later in the game you unlock the ability to swap monsters towards either the light or the dark. While it doesn’t change their ability a Dark Shifted Monk has significantly different stats than a Light Shifted Monk. So every monster has 3 slight variations. Unlike Pokémon their levelup path isn’t set either.. in this game you can choose skill trees.

Every monster in the game has four Skill trees, some with more abilities than others, but basically you choose how your Catzerker will develop. Do you let him focus on Neutral damage with a lot of points invested in getting more and more powerful critical hits? Or do you want him to use his Fire and Wind abilities to take advantage of enemies that are weak to that. Perhaps you want your Spirit Toad to be focussed on AoE Attacks with the chance to poison your enemies as you go.. or perhaps like me you want to build him like a completely support focussed tank, that can buff as he heals and heals as he buffs. Are these choices not working out for you? Resetting their skills costs next to nothing! Once a monster reaches the max level of 40, they get an ultimate and you can choose from three of them. This leads to one of this game’s greatests boons! All the monsters feel like YOUR unique monsters. Yes there are Meta’s you can look up, yes some builds will work better than others.. but you can build your own challenge level here and my Toad isn’t exactly like any other Toad.

This of course also leads to a lot of depth in combat,which is reflected by the many areas of the game. Each of the twelve zones tend to have about two subzones. For example in the great forest you first encounter a lot of woodland critters like monsters, bugs, bears and plant like creatures. More often than not they have a fire weakness, though there is some diversity, a bias can definitely be sensed. The second part of the woods is overrun by Goblins who all are strong against magic but weak against physical attacks. Since each combat sequence sends out three monsters, you find you’ll have to swap out members semi regularly if you want to make it far. Luckily the game offers an easy level up token, that allows you to add levels to weaker monsters, for almost no money.. the downside to this token, you can’t use it to level higher than one level below your highest rank monster. If your highest monster is max level.. and it gains enough experience.. that is not wasted.. instead that monster now produces level-up tokens to save you from grinding. The diversity in the world, the leveling and the biodiversity in this game all come together. Which makes everything feel unique.

The game is also very generous with rewards, there are lots of secrets for you to explore! Remember that one room you could not enter before because you had no monster that could activate a pressure Switch?! Now you can.. and the reward in the chest is better if you get it at this level then later on. However if you choose to press on that item you find can later be upgraded to still be a viable find! Everything in this game oozes freedom. There are completely optional areas, but going there offers you some of the best gear. There are even secrets upon secrets which for example lead you to unique monsters such as the Team 17 iconic Worms to be added to your team who have skill trees that mimic the feeling of the little crawlers. There are plenty of cool references to the material the game maker “borrowed” from as well to show that this is a game made out of love! And you can play it your way!

What is there to dislike?

Like any game this one doesn’t escape having a few downsides though. The most prominent one is the “loot chance” aspect of finding an egg. Say you discover a monster that can cut through vines.. by performing well you get a higher star rating.. the higher the star rating the higher the chance is to get a rare item. Eggs always fall in this slot.. but many monsters also drop something else. So unless you get a five star rating (which guarantees a rare drop) you getting a monster is already locked behind TWO RNG checks. To alleviate this a lot of monsters have overlapping abilities. Catzerker can cut the vines and destroy hidden walls, but Magmapillar can Burn the vines and light torches. So overall progress is never locked away to harshly behind RNG but later on you will encounter elemental switches at hard to reach places. While my Frost-Slime can activate Ice switches it might not be able to hit a remote one.. because you need a monster whose “activate ice switches” requires that trigger to be projectile based. There is no way to find out what variant a monster has until you catch it and if they don’t drop their egg due to RNG things can feel a bit frustrating.

A major grip I had with this game was not being able to put waymarkers on my map! It feels like the SNES metroid map, where you just have to remember that one room had no light and that the other room has a strange keyhole. On the one hand this really sells the classic vibe and in a way I like it but on the other hand.. since the map is so big that there is not a single screenshot of the entire explored map out there you can understand it might be kind of frustrating if you remember you encountered a room somewhere you can solve now.. but for the live of you , you can’t remember where. I have a good memory when it comes to those things, and since the areas look diverse enough it never feels atrocious but a quick reminder at times would have been nice. The game at times lacks those quality of life improvements modern games have.. I think just to be retro. For example the final boss is a two tiered fight.. if you lose the second you’ll have to repeat the first and since I work with a stall team that for me was a 20 minute fight I had to do over, I had no trouble beating it. It just took time.

Which brings me to the final gripe I have with this game and that is the level of Tedium at later levels. This game HAS to be played relying on buffs and debuffs, if you focus on assault alone the enemy will debuff the heck out of you and it will feel like you are taking down a dragon with a potato peeler. While I had debuffers in the Underworld my debuff removers were weak to the enemies typing so I could not use them all that much.. which means in some fights my damage was reduced by 25% six times over or so.. When I got that specific monster (a spider that ensnares you with web) he became a staple in my team as well and I debuffed the heck out of enemies.. but combat can feel really slow. The game has a combo system.. the third attacker deals the most damage, and the first two build up your multiplier.. however if you have to switch because you are debuffed into infinity you also nerf your non impaired team members. While the game doesn’t punish you with DEATH too often, it does with a lot of delays.

So is it good?!

Overall it didn’t really kill my joy for playing this game, I loved it in the end and already want a sequel! This game is very dear to me! I really enjoyed the time I spent with my monsters and have formed a bond with them. The combination of Pokémon and Meteoroid works super well and I would love to see more things in this universe. There is a lot of lore about every monster, like every “pokédex” entry is four or so pages long filled with much more text than in Pokémon, you can learn about their history and their current day use.. these monsters are very concrete and well balanced out.. every monster feels different and you can make it stand out from its peers! Adding platformer gameplay to that just made it more fun to me.

It does make the mistake of going retro, just a bit to much in parts but for me as a retro gamer that is more of a minor annoyance something I have to do to get to the good stuff.. but the good stuff is worth it several times over, even if a sequel would not improve anything I would still buy it without a second thought.. and retro games all had that tedium or that sense of annoyance about them as well. It is just a shame that I do see this game take a lot quality of life improvements then skimping out on others. Perhaps if they had more static save points and leaned more into the retro I would be less upset.. which is kind of weird.. I would be less vexxed if the game was less good. Maybe I am just kind of sad I nearly got my perfect game.. and it JUST missed out on that. Kind of like getting that perfect gift for christmas.. the watch you want but there is this one tiny scratch you barely notice yet it gets under your skin! Regardless of that scratch though you should most certainly pick this game up!

Thank you for taking your time to read about me playing with monsters again! I do that a lot huh! If you want to help me get more monster games, consider supporting me on Kofi or Patreon! Of course you can also just tell how much you like Monster Games and I will probably be coaxed into it anyway.

It’s Impossible! … Not To Have Fun! Yooka Laylee and the Impossible Lair Review

Konichi-what a satisfying feeling, to treat yourself to a game for your birthday and have it be as good as The Impossible Lair is to me! For those who read my rambling and store them in their head a bit , it might not come as a surprise but one of my favourite Platforming franchises of all times was Donkey Kong Country. I adored those games. So the Sequel to the already amazing Yooka Laylee came out.. and it would mimic the classic Donkey Kong Country games rather than the Banjo Kazooie franchise. I was more than hyped to play this. I figured content would be a bit lacking though so I bided my time to find a good sale.. I sure as heck got my money’s worth now!

Don’t Worry BEE Happy

The Impossible Lair is the second Yooka Laylee game by Playtonics Games, published by team 17. It enjoys moderate success on Meta-Critic with about a 7.7 user score consistent out of 78 positive reviews, 17 negative ones and 9 mixed ones. I’d say the grade is slightly low.. but that is because this game comes with a bit of a warning and unique concept. The game has a self imposed style difficulty level, with a rather steep drop in the deep at the end. It is a game without difficulty settings but instead, you as the player are more or less free to determine your own difficulty level. This however.. does not apply for the final level.. which is a very harsh stage. One life.. and if you lose.. you get booted out of the level.. and since it’s a 30 minute level… it isn’t easy! Lots of people do not like this system and think the last level is unfair.. but I honestly don’t believe it is. It’s a very natural evolution of the old school difficulty system that blends in perfectly with the ban on traditional stock of lives. Most people play this game the wrong way I think.. and I might have found the perfect way to do it!

The entire concept of this game is that the final stage of the game is also the very first stage of the game. A small story tells you how Capital B, the franchise enemy uses a device called the Hivemind to control all the bees in the world. This leads the queen of the Stingdom to be overpowered and her precious shield gets stolen. Yooka and Laylee but in the fight and get to play the Impossible Lair stage from the beginning. In theory.. you can beat this game in about half an hour.. if you are a god tier gamer.. there even is an achievement tied to it.. YET people think.. because there is an achievement for it.. it should be doable.. but this game takes a different approach.. it shows you through the achievement it is near impossible to do this. Like.. offering a money fee to people who can hack into your new security system.. it’s not like you want to hand out that price.. you are confident that your thing is impossible to crack!

This rubs a lot of people the wrong way with this game.. but I , who was born without the ability to give any fudges about prestige like things such as achievements or victories over others.. and is just here for the fun, love this idea. Based on what type of gamer you are you can immediately see if pursuing “platinum” is something you can do.. and I can not! .. But I am getting a bit of track here! Once you die in the first stage you get booted out and the overworld opens up.. here you can travel to twenty five-ish chapters by exploring the overworld and exploring the stages. Using T.W.IT. Coins you find in stages and beating special stages you unlock more and more areas in the overworld and learn more about the game. Inside the stages you try to make it to the end and free.. one of the 48 beettalion bees. Why? because they become your hit points for tackling that final stage! Man I love that concept!

To BEEt or not to BEEt that is the question

_{Yes I know I spelled that wrong}

Here is how most people tackle this game.. okay so I need to free all the bees.. and then go tackle the final stage. Most negative comments I’ve seen are of people trying to rush things. Just beat all the stages and gather the bare minimum of T.W.IT. Coins to go through the final stage without any disadvantages or advantages.. This however is the WRONG way to go about that. The game technically is fairly hard.. though with infinite lives all stages are beatable.. so many people delude themselves that just by beating the game you are good enough for that final stage.. then they plunge into a half hour gauntlet of grueling challenges completely unprepared for what is to come. Most negative reviews say “I was having a lot of fun with this game, then I reached the final stage and could not beat it.. what a fricked up game 0 out of 10… Well first of all if you have 90% fun… just don’t like the last stage.. it is NOT a 0 out of 10 game. This game makes it fairly clear it’s not about beating it. In fact I would have been perfectly content with getting across the finish and just enjoy playing in some very fun stages. See how far you get!

Yet I think if these people played the game the way I play it.. they would have had a lot more fun! You see.. beating an area , instead of going to the next one first I take a crack at the Impossible Lair first.. to see how far my current Beetalion will get me! Usually that isn’t very far.. because the final stage REALLY is hard.. but this means I slowly make my way through sections of the stage.. getting a feel for the layout of the place. If I get tripped up by a section with a lot of buzzsaws .. I then will make sure that I 100% complete a stage (as in find all T.W.I.T. Coins) as a practice for that section. I then move on to get the next batch of bees and repeat this process. Yes I failed a few times in the last stage.. but this way I am not going in blind and in the end have to do a 30 minute stage blind. I notice I am keeping my bees with me for longer as I go as well. But here is the truth.. YOU ARE GOING TO LOSE… just like retro games gave you a game over resetting all progress.. this game mimics that by just yeeting you out the final stage without checkpoints. You get good by losing.. not by beating stages. That’s how these games always worked.. Now there is just a lot of stuff built in to have fun with.. without beating the final stage.

BEE a Hunter

The story in this game is practically non-existent , an evil guy causes trouble. .you have to travel to his castle to beat his ass… and that is exactly why I love this game so much. Never did I feel compelled that I needed to see the ending, it’s just a part of the skeleton that can help you have fun.. but even if you miss a single bone somewhere.. you can probably still have fun! Finishing this game is a cherry on top of a sundae.. or for me.. a chocolate pudding as I don’t like Ice Cream. It’s not the ULTIMATE goal needed to enjoy the game. There is so much to do that can give you satisfaction.. beat all the 48 regular stages! Find all the tonics in the overworld.. solve all the pagie challenges. Open all the Paywalls (These are the names for checkpoints you open with the T.W.I.T. coin resource). There is cute dialogue from familiar and unfamiliar NPC the overworld is colourful and creative and allows you to use all your platforming skills in a 3d setting.. almost in a zelda-esque way. There is so much to do! This is a 12-ish hour platform game and that is a lot for the genre!

Tonics make your life easier or harder.. you find them hidden in the overworld, once found you unlock them with feathers, you can carry three at the same time and these provide modifiers to the game world, some make your life easier.. for example I used the “do not lose T.W.I.T. coins after death” one.. This one makes sure I keep my coins even if I do not bring them to a checkpoint in time! This means I can leap to my death to obtain some of these.. saving me a lot of frustration. This does mean however that the feathers I collect at the end of the stage get reduced.. to compensate for that I use a tonic that sticks googly eyes on the enemy making them look more cute.. but gives them two hit points instead of one! Which increases my feather count. Then I use a tonic that makes Laylee the bat.. more tranquil..
In this game you start with two hitpoints. In phase one you have Laylee riding on Yooka but once you take a hit she begins to panic and flap about.. if you can collect her before you take another hit or you are fine you regenerate that hitpoint.. if she flies away.. your can not be hit anymore or suffer your demise. So having her more stable allowed me to try some zanier stunts. There are a lot of fun modifiers, such as inverted controls for more feathers, more invisibility frames for less feathers and lots and lots of visual modifiers for no other reason than just to have fun!

“But wait A minute Pinkie.. did you not just say there were 48 bees to collect.. but only 25 chapters.. how does that work”… well my sharp eyed friend.. or people pretending to be clever to the insight I just provided… Most stages have two varients. You can unlock a second mode by interaction with the overworld. For example a book on a pond might indicate a stage featuring lots of water elements but by eating an ice fruit and having Yooka spit it at the stage portal.. that same stage is suddenly frozen solid.. which completely alters the stage layout and path. These alternate stages are very fun and it’s always a surprise to see what happens. There is a stage where the book gets covered in sticky honey suddenly turning a horizontal stage into a vertical stage. There is also a certain book you can read the wrong way.. suddenly you have to backtrack this level.. chased by deadly lasers.. but since there is so little time.. you more or less travel atop of the first stage. Think of these as the reversed levels of Yoshi’s crafted world.. but done a lot better. It’s not just beating the stage that is a challenge.. it’s also finding a way to unlock the counterpart in the overworld that is a delight.

Finally there are the Pagie challenges, the collectable/Jiggy variant from the first game is back in this game.. not to be collected by you but to use that power you unlocked before in your favour.. but you have to prove your worth to them. The challenge is simple .. beat all the enemies in a single screen without dying and the pagies will reshape the overworld. Allowing you to find more tonics, unlock more alternate stages, get more hit points for the final stage.. or even just find hint signs that provide you with clues where to find a particular type of treasure. Most of the time you can choose what you want to focus on to make progress. You will need to collect some coins in the stages to get past paywalls in the next areas but I never had too much trouble getting enough of those things without straining myself or feeling I was forced to do this. Even if i did .. feel like “I really should get extra coins in this stage” I either made it training for the final stage OR I decided to reward myself with a vanity tonic and would use my hunt for the coins to reward myself with vanity! It’s super fun and motivating that way.. everything just reinforces each other.

This might STING a bit

Is this a perfect game? No!… Yet in sale I only payed like 10 euro for it and King Coconut and the Shy Coconut helped the blog get some funds for reviewing projects like those..as well as the Buddy Coconut.. so I was super content. I do have a hand full of grips with the game though. First of all I find the music slightly forgettable.. I love the overworld team and for good reason. It’s Grant Kirkhope. It is fantastic. He made music for both the original and for Banjo Kazooie and it has that distinct feel. He doesn’t do stuff for the 2d stages and that is okay.. because his style fits the overworld more.. that feels a bit Banjo-esque.. The 2d stages feel like Donkey Kong.. and two people where put in charge of this Matt Griffin, who does a very good job at capturing that DK spirit but making it feel original and David Wise.. who makes every stage he designs the soundtrack off sound like that Royalty Free Ukulele music that is everywhere on YouTube… Can you guess which one is the one I consider a downside?! A few stages in and you can really tell who is who and that kind of irked me a bit. On the one hand we hear how good the music can be.. on the other hand we see what I as an anime fan would call.. musical filler episodes. Blegh! Luckily half of the music is still good!

The second issue I have with the game is it’s level design.. well that is the wrong worth.. the level “assets” and esthetics. While it is nice that zones are themed we do not get that many themes and it all has this really familiar aspect. The buildings in the desert world look different from the ones in the forest world.. but it feels more like a skin change than an actual change in the assets.. The best way to describe this is.. that everything in the background feels a bit “Little Big Planet ” You know that game with sackboy! There are loads of assets to make your creation look unique but it is all tied to a very similar style. So a tree house looks the same like a cactus house.. the cactus house just has .. hacienda style wallpaper. It makes the stages a little less exciting than the original game or it’s big inspiration Donkey Kong. There we have a volcano world, a theme park world.. a swamp world (Okay that is the second Donkey Kong but it’s just so good) and here.. you’d get.. a Roller Coaster going to the same forest assets.. some hue shifted wood textures to make it look a bit darker.. to signify we are in the swamp.. maybe there is a pool of water.. but all in all I always kind of keep expecting sackboy to come stumbling through. The stage challenges and level design as in.. how to get from A to B is fantastic though. The set dressing is a bit stock.

The final gripe I have with this game is the tiniest one. There is not enough interaction with NPC’s .. mostly from Laylee.. I loved how bold she was in the last game. While I do get that there is less dialogue in a 2d platform game, plenty of elements in the overworld and sometimes even in the stages talk to you through a small text balloon. It would have been funny to give Laylee a bit more flavour and would make everything pop. If a Pumpkin tell “hey you are not support to be here” .. it would be fun to say Laylee tell it to shut up or she will eat squash tonight..or even give her some 4th wall breaking humor.. that once you encounter the living fans in the overworld Laylee would comment, they are really running out of ideas. Simple stuff like that could help the game pack that Yooka Laylee flavour a bit more. THe rest is there.. but the two main characters don’t shine as brightly as I would.

BEE Plus

Time for me to score this game! It is tricky to do this for everyone else so do take note that this is just for me personally. I do think fun, challenge level and time needed are all self imposed. What do you define as beating the game, what do you think is fun to do within the confines of this game?! I really like this.. it has that shovel knight.. feeling of picking your difficulty, there are plenty of ways to make it easy.. there are plenty of ways to make it hard. Neither should be a gripe as you can choose not to use it. I will admit that the plunge into the final stage is a bit too steep and I would not call the final stage a great success. It might have been better if you had a few sub tiers and chose to continue at the last checkpoint with the amount of bees you had left when you got there -1 for each try or go back to the beginning if you lost too many bees in that segment. Had they done that I would have been perfectly content with this game despite it’s minor flas like generic music from Mister Wise.. and a lack of unique polish here and there. Controls are tight..graphics are fine and in sale it is super affordable.

Now I do have to conclude that not everything in the game is as fun as it can be. Honestly if I have to give advice to people who liked the Donkey Kong Country games.. I’d say the best way to play this game is to pick it up on sale.. play the stages until you had your fill.. try the impossible lair and if you did not reach the 50-70% marker (depending on how many of the bees you got) and just end it right there! Quit while you had fun, this is a game to have fun with not one I’d say you really need to beat. It’s a neat achievement to check off your list but there is no big epic ending you would need to do it for. It’s the classical video game ending with a story wrap up.. in the vein of those classics.

There is no deep lore you will miss. No secrets that will be needed to play the third game if there ever will be one.. which I would hope mixes the two playstyles. This is a game to have fun with.. and the game knows it!You can literally put glittery effects when you defeat an enemy, or put googly eyes on an enemy to make them cuter.. sometimes those eyes are on their bumholes! Teehee! Cinematic filters, Dramatic Sepia.. tonics that make you have to play this game like a bat.. Everything screams that this is just a game to have fun with and that’s what I did ! Strawberries all around!