Curse of the Crescent Isle DX
This game is honestly not ready for primetime. I wanted to like it: a classic platformer built around picking up and throwing objects (like Super Mario Bros 2!), with visuals that look like 16-bit+, and a transplant from the defunct XBLIG store which holds a special place in my heart? Awesome.
Unfortunately it's not there yet. The first thing you're greeting by when you get past the start screen is an ugly menu with an enormous font, and about 15 menu options laid out in a two column grid. Even though the menu is a two column grid, you can't push left or right to navigate it, just up and down. The default key bindings are very poor, so I highly recommend you play on a controller. The game features a password system, which sounds like a fun bit of retro nostalgia, but the password system has the letters of the alphabet laid out in a grid... that you can only navigate by pushing up and down. The main menu says "Press Start", perhaps a holdover from XBLIG. If you go to exit you get this hideous developer mode prompt asking you if you're sure you want to exit in huge poorly aligned text strings going across the screen.
Why do I fixate on the menu? Because it's emblematic of how the game feels unfinished. Enter a level and you'll see that the "coin" count (actually is are only one coin per level, a "hidden" collectible--this could probably be done differently in the UI) is poorly aligned with the heart counter, which is vertical like SMB2 to its detriment.
When you move between levels, the map seems to load with the camera facing very far away and then whip across the level with blinding speed to get back to you--this is hard on the eyes and again feels unfinished. This wouldn't be a problem, except in a few levels the camera whips by enemies and plays their sounds, and many of the enemy sounds are very shrill and hard on the ears.
When you die, the sound simply stops and the game pauses for a second before fading the foreground to black. The effect looks very strange, the lack of feedback is bad, and it's slow. Consider what happens when you die in classic Super Mario Bros--the little ditty plays, the screen cuts to a lives counter (not applicable here), but I'm saying it shows how visual and audio feedback is part of how you design a game. That's not present in CotCI DX
Text boxes, which appear when you talk to characters in the game, has insufficient spacing between words so when you try to read the text it's difficult to follow.
There's visible tile seams, as you can see in the screenshot. Some bricks look fine but often the tile textures seem unfinished. The backgrounds are wildly inconsistent: some backgrounds, like the one you can see in the screenshot above with the pig king, have a cool parallax effect. Others are static images but animated. Several levels just have pure black backgrounds.
The entire game the camera feels a little too zoomed in. An important part of designing a platformer is ensuring the right balance between your character being large enough to see and provide details, but small enough so that jumping and moving feels good. Several levels feature points where it's difficult to see far enough around your character to see what you're doing.
Much of the level design is oddly boxy. Many of the levels are enormous, particularly those that use the gravity-inverting powerup to send you flying through a vast expanse. Big maps are generally a bad idea when designing a game, but they're a temptation for every first-time game designer. Then, platforming or puzzles levels typically are very small and cramped and much of the platforming involves putting low ceilings so that you can't jump near your full height. Because the main mechanic of the game is carrying objects and the developers want to force you to drop the objects to get past certain sections, I understand why they did this kind of cramped design, but it makes the levels feel kinda janky.
At least two levels that I noticed make it possible to get stuck mid level. One is the puzzle level around mid-way through where you need to pick up an orange guy at the beggining, boost on top of a column, and then throw a icicle guy right. The other is the final boss level, where if you accidentally drop your weapon in the (?) second last phase, you can't kill him. You can restart the current level through the menu, but again it's just a frustrating experience.
The final boss is pretty annoying in general. If you die, which is somewhat likely as you're learning his patterns, you restart at the beginning of the boss stage. This is fine, except you need to walk a few seconds to get to the boss and then talk to him, and then sit through a cutscene. This is a mistake that many professional games make, but it's annoying regardless.
The ending is weird, there's a smash cut from the final boss (no effect to see him dying or fade out or anything) into the ending, which is a static image with some text. The text looked like it didn't end properly, but no buttons I tried moved on to the next part of the text, except Enter/Start which just booted me back to the menu.
My playtime above includes idling the cards, but the game actually takes about 60-90 minutes. For replay you're encouraged to play as a second character, play a boss rush, and play a speedrun mode. I think this is fine value for money, but you should know what you're getting into.
In general this is a fun game and if you bought it I don't think you'd regret it. My issue is that this is not ready for release on Steam. Playtesting should have called attention to these issues and more, especially the menu/UI stuff which is immediately apparent. If this were an early access title, I'd recommend it and trust the developers would fix these issues, but this has been out for a while and has had some updates. It's beyond me why many of the issues I've raised in this review would have escaped the notice of the developer, and so the result is a game that feels sloppy and unpolished even though the core is a good looking, good sounding, interesting idea for a retro platformer.
_/¯
