Normally, I don’t consider “forgettable” to be a bad thing since I’d rather play a good game I don’t remember that well instead of a bad game I remember for the wrong reasons, but Starfox Adventures had to come along and be the first exception by having a mandatory segment where you have to match items to the locations you found/used them in. See, the game has two different horn instruments, and both are treated like your typical fetch-quest “go here and push the button” item. And sure, they both look very different and are used in distinctly different locations, but the overall gameplay is just so bland and bare-bones that I had genuinely forgotten about the entirety of the Cloudrunner Fortress by this point.
Oh, but there’s a bunch of stuff about the game I do remember. The beat-‘em-up combat is little more than “tap the A button and you win,” and if an enemy blocks your melee attacks too much, just pull out your magic staff and shoot them. When you’re not auto-locked onto an enemy during combat, aiming your magic staff is finicky and irritating since you have to keep the C-stick held in position or the reticle will recenter itself back in the middle of the screen. The game’s attempt at an overworld is very linear with lots of tedious backtracking (no fast travel), and many of these pointlessly-time-consuming rooms are just blatant attempts at disguising load times (which wouldn’t be so bad if you didn’t have to keep going back and forth through them throughout the game). The game’s excuses for puzzles are just there as gimmicks, being very easy (except for when they don’t work right, so you look up a walkthrough just to be told to do the same thing you’ve been doing) and abandoned shortly afterward. The actual Starfox-esque space-shooter sections are limited to just five 1-minute-long levels, and even they aren’t immune to the backtracking! You might think the beat-‘em-up combat would get more involved with the bosses, but no, the bosses are secretly just more puzzles (except the two that are shooter segments), and the bad guy who’s built up for most of the game is never fought. I beat this game and can confidently say it’s unfinished at best.
So yeah, I’ve been having another string of busts recently, hence my lack of posts, but I did beat this game just now, and it’s not too bad:
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Linxy The Lynx
31 minutes playtime
6 of 9 achievements
Platformer. Forward movement starts a bit slow, but it speeds up after a second or so, which is kinda awkward. You can still stop and turn around on a dime, though. Besides movement and jumping, you have a “crouch” which barely brings down your height at all and is only useful once to avoid a ceiling saw (twice if you count its duplicate in the remix levels), and you have an awkward slide that only activates if you’re running at top speed (and which you only ever need to use to attack the final (only) boss).
Level design is okay. The first couple ones are a bit too easy, and there’s one enemy type that takes two hits to kill for no reason, but it does start to pick up around level 5. Unfortunately, there are only five levels, and the boss is one of those that makes you wait a while for it to be vulnerable (and the waiting is a bit much until you’ve hit it a couple times and its attacks have picked up). You can unlock “remix” levels by finding computer-chip items in the levels, and if you miss one, you can exit the level from the menu right after getting it so you don’t have to replay the whole level, which is nice…but that still only brings the total number of levels up to 11, and as you can tell by my playtime, they’re all rather short. Honestly, between this, the cliffhanger ending, and the fact the game has an episode-selection that only ever has one episode available, this game might also very well be unfinished.
Still, as far as free games go, this one’s okay, so I can recommend it.