Yay, I got to play a good game for once! You could even say I got lucky. Heh heh heh.

This is a collectathon platformer. Along with your standard movement and jumping, you can push X to use a tail swipe that usually just stuns enemies (but can defeat certain ones) and you can hold the right trigger to burrow under soft ground. While underground, you move automatically and only change your movement direction with the left stick, and you jump out of the ground by releasing the right trigger. Controls are very responsive, even to the point where if you stop holding forward, you stop moving forward, even if your character is in mid-air; that’s the type of platformer controls I like the most since it means you don’t have to fight any physics to make precise jumps. There’s even a drop-shadow to help you judge where you are. The only part of the controls I can see needing to be tweaked is: if you turn around in mid air, you still have to wait for the turn around animation to play out before you start moving, but your jump arc continues to play out while the animation happens. The game is built around this, though, so even when you do notice it, it isn’t a big issue.

Camera controls are a bit limited, though: you can push the right stick left or right to change between one of three perspectives (forward, forward-left, and forward-right), and you can hold Y to zoom behind your character and look around in a full 180 degrees in front of you (releasing the button moves the camera back to one of the three aforementioned positions). I kinda wish there was a way to change the camera’s vertical orientation since there were a few times it seemed like the reason I got hit or missed a jump was because the camera was too forward-facing and not downward-facing enough.

Oh, you also have a double-jump. The game doesn’t tell you this, though; I had to figure it out on my own.

The main game-play consists of going through 3D and occasionally 2D levels, collecting clovers as you do so. Each main level has four clovers: the main one, the gather-300-coins one, the collect-all-five-letters one, and the hidden one. I like this approach to the collectathon formula as well since it helps reduce the arbitrary parts without becoming stale. For example, the letters can be hidden differently from one level to the next, but they’re always in-order so you know if you missed one before making it to the end of the level. The only problem is that quite a few levels have points of no return, so even if you realize you missed something in a previous part of the level, you’ll just have to beat the level and play it again. I’m also convinced that a couple of the 2D levels don’t have enough coins for people to get 300 coins on their first attempt, at least not without collecting all the coins that enemies drop, except the coins still spread out in 3D and can fall off the side of the level if you don’t tail-swipe right after defeating the enemy to collect said coins. At least the levels are fairly short if you’re just going for the main clover, so replaying them isn’t as bad as it could be. Plus, if you collect the letters in a level the second time, each letter gives you 10 extra coins, so that can help players get the 300-coin clover if they missed it on their first attempt.

But yeah, despite those minor issues, it’s possible for players to get all clovers in a level the moment they unlock the level; no backtracking or arbitrary coin purchases required, so I already like this game more than Super Mario Odyssey.

As you collect clovers and beat levels, you’ll unlock mini-levels. These range from auto-running levels to a physics-based marble-rolling mini-game to statue-sliding puzzles (yes, actual puzzles, not that vague, arbitrary moon-logic garbage that passes for puzzles in certain communities). Each of these levels only has one clover (the one for beating the level). I liked the puzzles the most since they do get pretty tricky (but not until the ones in world 3), and I liked the marble-rolling mini-game the least since I’ve never been a big fan of physics-based games (heck, I praised this game’s platform controls because they lack physics). The auto-runner levels are okay; they really just come across as more bland versions of the already-easy main levels. Yeah, you can hit switches to open a new path that leads to more coins, but all paths converge on the same clover.

If I had to think of one problem with the level design, it would be the maze in world 2. For the most part, if you end up behind solid textures, a circle of transparency will appear around you to show you where you are and what’s around you. However, even though this maze has walls that stick up high enough to block the lower part of the room north of them, the transparency won’t show up, and there were a couple times where I was hit by an enemy or fireball that I couldn’t see. Other than that and the points of no return, this game has very solid level design.

Overall, this is one of the most polished games I’ve played in a while, and if you’re a fan of platformers (not just collectathon platformers), I highly recommend it. I liked it enough that I got all 99 clovers in the main game. In fact, I, stingy as I am, am even thinking of buying the two DLC worlds, even though I still don’t have a job; that’s how good this game is.