Recent reviews by Itohiro

The worst/least fun instance in the series. Beating all developer records is not something most of the players wants. On top of that an extra micro-management resource was added that cannot be scheduled (ice cubes).

It is not great, but it is entertaining. If you have played the previous instalments you know what you are getting into. Otherwise, it is a worker-allocation/resource-management game where the strategy does not really matter as it is quite hard to fail if you play instinctively but quickly.

The platformer part is ok: it was nice to see every level having a 2nd variation, but the difficulty of the stages feels exponential. The stage of the final boss looks like one of the impossible stages of Mario Maker - it was extremely hard even with 49 extra lifes and tons of checkpoints. Exploring the overworld is the only part of the game that was actually enjoyable, with a cave-at: there are many secrets in the map that can only be found with guides (unless you enjoy walking around trying to interact with/attack the stage). The game is aesthetically pleasing, and its gameplay and mechanics are inspired by many giant platformers from the past, but its difficulty level in the final stages makes me not recommend it at all.

Great party game. Unfortunately, it has too few stages, so there is not much replayability.

In contrast to the base game, this is not a fun DLC. It might be great for those passionate about Senna, but it revolves around playing the same new tracks over and over with a combination of a small and easy subset of achievements (marks). The base-game tracks are not reused when playing this DLC, and since the new tracks are themed around F1, they all feel and look the same. I played the whole DLC, and I *feel* like I played at most 5 different tracks, although I think this DLC adds more than that. Unless you want to 100% the game or want the new F1 cars, you'd better stick to the base game and other DLCs.

The game should have been an ok-ish mindless time passer - its idea of "fun" is: test your reflexes to catch things that appear shortly; however, it was not properly design to achieve that goal:

- Generic theme
- There is little sense of progress. You can purchase all upgrades to your basket in one or two runs. One of them I still have no idea what it does.
- The game is painfully slow to start. Up until 2000-ish points you will take a couple dozen minutes, yet there is close to zero challenge catching the stars until then.
- Spawns are completely random, so you will commonly be given two options that are interesting (e.g. star vs extra life), but that are impossible to obtain simultaneously because they cross the "arrival line" close to simultaneously. This means that you will have to choose one, and given that if you do not catch the star the game does a soft reset, you will always prioritise the star.
- Again, due to the randomization, there are scenarios where even with perfect reflexes one would not be able to catch the star (e.g., you are on one side of the screen, and the star is on the other side, when stars are no longer falling slowly)
- Stars are not used as a currency. Instead, you collect coins from other objects, but due to the randomization problems mentioned above, it ends up taking forever to get enough coins.
- On top of being hard to get the money, most of the purchases are random - you cannot select what you want to buy within a category (baskets or background themes).
- The game artificially increases play time by adding achievements that rely on buying stuff with coins, which, as mentioned before, take forever to obtain. It also has an achievement that has a very high amount of catches of a specific power up, but the spawns are random, so your best bet is to keep playing until you have coins to buy said power up over and over. Yet, the game is super simple - players should never need to spend more time than it takes to develop a game to complete it.

I had good expectations for this game, but after a couple of minutes it got quite boring. The puzzles felt repetitive, and due to the constant search for the manoeuvrable objects, it felt more like a point and click than anything else, so solving puzzles didn't feel rewarding. To top it off, after a couple more minutes motion sickness started kicking in.

The game is well made and, overall, quite pleasant. Sometimes there is a lack of hints and you may get stuck, specially with respect to explosive walls, but it is still an enjoyable light-puzzled windwaker-like experience.

The BR is even better than in the first game.

An ok game. It is well made, but tends to be quite repetitive.