Options -> Control Config -> Auto Grab ON

Enjoy!

Tiny Barbarian is an indie gem. The gameplay is hard enough to be challenging and engaging enough to keep you playing until the end!

The music is top notch and the art direction really help make this game stand out.

I have put a good 7-10 hours into this game before it made it onto Steam.

I would recommend this game to anyone/everyone.

What if Rastan and Rygar where taken improved and made into a kickass new game... this is even better than that. GET IT, PLAY IT, LOVE IT.

Or not, if you are lame.

What do you like doing with your time? Does it involve killing snake, bird and miscellaneous soldiers that probably had a famillies to go home to? Maybe while doing some solid platforming and pillaging their greatest treasures? Yes? Then Tiny Barbarian is the game for you! Damn right those children are going to have a terrible Christmas, you just murdered their parents! All in a day's work for a barbarian.

I've beat this game at least 5 times before it made its way onto Steam, and everytime I do I feel a little more barbaric. Can you say the same? Of course you can't, YOU HAVEN'T BOUGHT THIS GAME YET! Why not? Is it because of the murdering potential parents thing? Don't worry about that, you're probably doing those kids a favor. Now they can grow up to be masked vigilantes that call you their nemesis. Sounds like a win win to me. You get awesome masked vigilantes in the world and a new foe to vanquish, BEING A BARBARIAN IS AWESOME.

Let's recap here, you platform in this game, you murder everything in this game and you pillage their greatest treasures. This is the most realistic and advanced barbarian simulation game I have ever played, just a little Tinier.

I’m sure you’ve heard the expression “Quit while you’re ahead.” It means that you shouldn’t keep messing with a good thing because you might end up ruining it. Tiny Barbarian was left in a sticky spot years ago, containing two of four promised episodes with no completion date in sight. Those two episodes contained some classic, challenging platforming that people wanted more of, and as of October 2017 they got their wish. Tiny Barbarian is now complete, with four full episodes and one bonus episode to wrestle with. And after working through as much of it as I could, I really think they should have quit while they were ahead.

I’ll give Tiny Barbarian credit for one thing, it has one of the best openings of any platformer around. Right when you start, the game pans up to a desperate mountaintop siege starring you against an endless horde of slavering monsters. The game proper starts when you inevitably die, but it’s a great sort of free-form tutorial and a lot of fun on its own. The longer you hold out the more dire the situation becomes, throwing archers and giants at you as lightning flashes overhead. I adore how it sets the stage for the game and though it never quite returns to the same heights of mayhem and slaughter, it’s a very memorable moment.

The meat of the game plays out over four episodes, each culled from a different cinematic or gaming reference. The first episode is a full homage to Conan the Barbarian, starting you out nailed to a tree and seeing you battle through a desert and palace of snake-worshiping foes in search of your lovely lady-love. In the second episode you and she travel into a steamy jungle filled with wily apes and giant bees that make it less than a pleasant jaunt. The third is very clearly Castlevania-inspired, with your demure berserker assaulting a dark tower suspended above an unfortunate burg. And the fourth episode… well, I won’t spoil it but it subverts expectations in a big way and presents something fresh and entertaining over the rest of the game.

Though the episodes have very little narrative connection to each other, they provide rollicking good backdrops for all the barbaric chaos you can get up to. Your dude has a high-flying leap and a three-hit combo with his sword that does extra damage on the third hit. He can also swing upwards and elbow-drop, and when strung together these moves can juggle enemies to hilarious effect. Combat is a very strong point of this title, allowing you to take on plenty of enemies at once by sweeping them up with your blade and carving them to pieces while they bounce around helplessly. You’ll also get to experiment with other combat concepts like reflecting bombs and magic, riding wild animals and trampling foes, and some projectile-based attacks that even the odds between you and more advanced enemies.

Your enemies can be a challenge to deal with but it’s the platforming that will give you the most trouble, thanks to some old-school design sensibilities. In addition to your jump you can hang on ledges and ropes, often hanging across yawning pits of spikes or bottomless abysses. You’ll need to leap from rope to rope to tiny platform to rope in some cases, or make pixel-perfect long jumps, or contend with swooping enemies that can knock you to your doom. In the opening episode there isn’t much precision platforming (though there are some tricky moving platforms near the end), but every episode after that ramps up the difficulty in some very unpleasant ways.

The problem with Tiny Barbarian is that the quality of design fluctuates wildly between episodes, and threatens to sour you on the experience the further you get in. Episode one is great, don’t get me wrong. It’s tightly-designed, challenging in fun ways, and has lots of neat little setpieces to work through. Episode two is where the paint starts to peel, and not just in a few areas. You have infinite lives so dying usually isn’t a problem but checkpoints are spaced further and further apart, and there’s more than one long sequence of platforming that you’ll have to do over if you miss a single jump near the end. The enemies have some extremely aggressive patterns, especially the insects in the latter half. And the boss of the episode is one of the most infuriating creatures I’ve ever had to fight, requiring ridiculous timing and hopping on platforms that seemed to only work half the time.

I had hoped that was the worst of it, but episode three put it to shame. It introduces a new gimmick where you can move to the background but puts enemies on both layers, making it hard to see where to fight and dodge when you’re behind things. There’s a platforming section with one-square-large platforms and pixel-perfect jumps that you need to make WHILE bats are flying at you constantly. Then you get to contend with multiple levels of crushing walls and floors that are almost completely unmarked, forcing trial-and-error progression. Even after getting through that you’re treated to some screen-wrapping mazes and a final boss with three parts that only gets more and more agonizing with each phase. Episode four almost redeemed it with a clever twist on the gameplay and some much more reasonable platforming at the onset, but descended to the same ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ difficulty by the end and culminated in a final boss that I’m not going to waste my time trying to beat.

Not only does Tiny Barbarian’s difficulty go off a cliff, it does so in legitimately unfair ways and I’m not just talking about those ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ unmarked crushers. Just like the classic controller-breakers of yore they love to send swooping birds and bats to knock you into pits but during ascents here, they can appear randomly from the top of the screen and hit you before you can react. Bosses can be stunned and juggled by your heavy sword swing but it doesn’t always work, and it’s a lunge so if it doesn’t work you’ll take a hit from running into the boss. And there’s a section near the end where you need an AI partner to do something but they can’t jump on their own, so sometimes when the game separates you they’ll get stuck and you have to restart from the checkpoint. In a game that demands so much precision, it’s unforgivable that it can fail you and force do-overs through no fault of your own.

I really wanted Tiny Barbarian to turn out good, and for the longest time I was still willing to give it a thumbs-up. The pixel art is lovely and the soundtrack is ridiculously catchy, honestly I’ve been humming one of the themes for days despite being mad as hell at the game. But yeah, I’m mad as hell at the game for wasting my time with overly-hard platforming and unfair deaths. This isn’t like Volgarr the Viking where the game is blistering hard but fair, this is overall easier but you will absolutely hate the ways it kills you sometimes. And ever if the platforming was okay the bosses very much are not, forcing you to use uncertain mechanics to overcome brutal patterns and room-filling attacks. If they had somehow preserved the quality of that first golden episode this could be one for the ages, but as it stands the game would have been all the better without anything added.



Did you enjoy this review? I certainly hope so, and I certainly hope you'll check out more of them at https://goldplatedgames.com/ or on my curation page!

My review of Tiny Barbarian DX.

https://youtu.be/PNUTxKJpJyQ

I really am in two minds about this game.

On the one hand I really want to like it and it's not like there isn't much on offer here. The game has an appealing aesthetic, lots of indie charme, surprisingly fresh level design, varied enemies and locales, multiple moves, combos, an old-school soundtrack - take your pick! I even backed this game on Kickstarter.

On the other hand I have not walked away that frustrated from a playsession with a platformer in a really long time. So what's wrong? That's not so easy to pin down.

Just for perspective: I have been playing platformers for half my life now (so in the realm of fifteen years and counting - yes I'm old, I know) and consider myself to be fairly able at it. Of recent fame, I finished Cave Story, Guacamelee and Shovel Knight. All these games contain more than their share of challenging platforming and boss fights, but have I ever felt that frustrated playing them? No.

So: What wrong? Well first off the timimg of the controls and the game as a whole (as in how "tight" and responsive the controls are and whether a given level plays out deterministically in terms of when does which enemy fire etc.) seem to be really wonky. I cannot count the number of times I have taken cheap hits or deaths because some button press did not register or the "pattern" of the level just did not play out the same way this single time.

Secondly, as good as the overall level design is, it sometimes suffers from the chosen aesthetic. Foreground and Background sometimes merge too much to support the amount of twitch apparently required. It also often takes the one step that makes a fun challenge into a more frustrating ordeal. Ample amounts of spikes at the bottom of an already challenging platforming section with enemy involvement (and wonky controls) are an example of this. It also sometimes feels like there is exactly one thing too much going on on the screen to be able to figure out the "rythm" or pattern of the level that is usually required to master it. I don't have the feeling this is possible in this game (especially given the wonky timing mentioned above). Might be that's not the kind of platformer gameplay envisioned by the devs, that's fair. But for me that is the heart of every good platformer: There can be a good amount of twitch, but if you really figure out a level, beating should not require big amounts of it.

So can I recommend it? If it comes down to the most important question, namely whether I enjoyed playing the game, I guess the answer is "No" for the above reasons - as much as it hurts me, especially after having backed this on Kickstarter. I am not looking forward to playing the game again, although I likely will to finish it at some time.

There is much good in the game, but given how frustrating it is to me, I cannot recommend it.

Tiny Barbarian DX has a lot going for it, but it unfortunately suffers a lot from misconception of what really matters in a good platformer.

On the plus side, the artistic direction is lovely. Landscapes and enemy sprites are gorgeous, and the game has a wide variety of settings for the player to enjoy. Most importantly, it has an amazing soundtrack. There's lots of themes, drawing primarily from the 8-bit scene, and they're just so good. It's definitely a musical masterpiece. Also, props for managing to capture that well the spirit of Castlevania's musical ambiance in Act 3.

Now apart from the mostly ok level design, there are numerous major issues going on on the gameplay side. I did not mind regular enemies' patterns as much as most bad reviews around. To me, the trick generally comes down to understanding the right timings for attacking and backing off. The real problem for me is the actual combat mechanics :

1) Combo attacks. If you can't do it right, don't do it. A sophisticated combat system is typically not something you need to make a great platformer.

2) The sword lacks range, plain and simple. An extra bit of range would have avoided unnecessary frustration, as a lot of the time, when you land a hit on an enemy, you're gonna get hit as well for ramming into its hurtbox, even though you had an attack timing that would be more than correct in a lot of platformers.

The platforming also has a massive cheap punishment potential.

Grabbing stuff is weirdly complicated, as you have to make the input, as opposed to just keeping the key or button held down, and the input is different for ledges and ladders. It may seem like I'm just being nitpicky, but trust me, that's gonna be a problem when the level design's so tight that you don't have any maneuverability margin. And that applies to a lot of rooms.

Basically, this game manages to make an issue of something that should be intuitive and unnoticeable.

Now when it comes to the bosses, it's a fiasco. First, almost every single boss in the game has a ton of health. Not a problem in itself, but given they're always either very easy once you figured out their patterns, or still pretty hard, either because there's a lot of RNG and stuff flying around at the same time, or they have a shield and let you attack once every blue moon, it's just boring and unrewarding.
Not to mention the fact that your character's rather slow and has that teeny tiny range, which makes most boss fights tedious on its own.

Boss patterns are also just not that inspired.

Despite a big yes on the audio side, I can't recommend this game. It has an exceptional artistic direction, but the gameplay itself is quite mediocre. (Also, look at that price tag. Plenty of studios do a lot better and end up charging half that amount for it.)

Fantastic action platformer that just feels really good to play. Until you hit a difficulty wall and just keep dying. But overcoming that wall feels good. Until the next wall. Thankfully you get unlimited lives, and the normal checkpoints aren't far apart, it's the persistent checkpoints (where you can start again after quitting the game) that are much farther apart. You have to wonder why every checkpoint can't be persisted. Also the final boss has 3 forms, and while the (persisted!) checkpoint after the first form is a godsent, the fact that there's none after the second form leads to a lot of frustration.

But if I didn't like the game, I wouldn't have pushed so hard as to finally beat it. Now maybe some day I'll come back and try to beat it with the newly unlocked character...

Ye olde curses.

As a platform inspired by the '80 classics, "Tiny Barbarian" doesn't hold the shots. It's cute. It's difficult. It's frustrating.

It's something we don't like to remember about those days: sure platforms were great, but also hard as f**ck, and not always for the right reasons. "Tiny Barbarian" brings it all back.

Great pixel graphics, shows the love and dedication of the developers, yet painful to play.

The problem? It banks on poor controls and annoyingly placed checkpoints to spike the difficulty, and it shows.

Even worse, when you have finished a difficult section you don't feel you had improved in the game at all, but instead, you just beat the odds by replaying it over and over...

All that love poured into a game that's just not fun, it's just sad.

2/5