Monster Boy and the Cursed Kingdom

This game looks good and has a really good soundtrack inside, the graphics are still good, but the game play lacks... the control is not good and a few of bugs to change or use a thing in the game! Overall, it´s good but not perfect to have fun...

I picked it up to kill the wait for some other games and heard it was hard. Well, it is. There's the fun kind of hard, but this game isn't. The good: It's pretty and the OST is good. It controls well. That's it. The bad: The difficulty is not the fun kind. Starting with area 3, the player is forced into a form good ONLY for sniffing out secrets. It's terrible in combat, it's terrible in terms of mobility. And the area is saturated with flying enemies which have to be hit with frame-tight precision or can't be retaliated against at all. Grounded enemies in turn kill you in 2-3 hits. Bombservice games are hard. Momodora games and Minoria are tough as nails. But you know what they give you that this game doesn't? Proper tools to move around and FIGHT BACK. 3.5/10. The era of quarter-munchers is over, developers. Ghosts and Goblins belong in the past, and so does this game.

-This game is exactly what they say it is. It starts off really easy, but the volcano zone has no business having that spike in difficulty. I even thought "maybe I´m missing some item to progress more easily". After 2 hours exploring, I found them ... well deep in the volcano zone after 20 deaths. -Shileds are useless, their hit area is way too small to be effective 80% of the times. -You´ll find yourself watching walkthroughs to solve some of the puzzles. -Some areas/puzzles require precision-platformer controlls... without being designed for it (kind of like Guacamelee: precision platformer with beat-em-all controlls. If you hated that, don´t try this, and viceversa). I rated it highly because I knew what I was getting into and out of respect for the saga. Not a bad game, it just lures you into thinking it´d be easier than it really is.

I overall had a good time being someone that's played a couple of metroidvania's. Platforming and combat mostly hits that sweet spot of challenging yet not impossble. Punishing carelessness when you have to be more percise. The puzzles were satisfactory enough to change things up. They require you to think a bit more compared to other metroidvania's but not in a bad way for my tastes. There were a couple that take longer than they should due to poor communicating on what your to do, or simple trial and error where the timing has to be pixel perfect and with perfect timing. Which does lead to frustrating moments. Exploration checks off all the boxes, you search for health, magic, etc. With a nice armor upgrade system that addes just the right amount of depth for this kind of game. Best of all the backtracking is not a massive pain that plagues others in the genre. Story was nothing special, its just satisfactory enough to somewhat keep you going. It didn't really get any interesting until say a little more than half way through. But if your someone like me that's played a lot of story driven games you already know what's coming. Character's possess their usual unique quirks. Some you just want to smash, others are the standard likable "Insert character type here". With really the uncle being anything that can kind of stick to your mind. It is a decent length with nice clean graphics, mostly smooth animations, with cartoon aesthetic. The soundtrack to match. Each track doesn't get old and fits the theme of each area nicely. A overall good production quality that helps it stand out from the crowd. Also nice to not have yet another pixel platformer. Overall I'd give it a 8/10. It checks off the boxes for a good platformer in the metroidvania genre. Some hickups mostly due to design issues. It'll give your standard platformer fan some much needed quality content.

The switching of different animals to navigate throughout the realm is both challenging and fun. The searching for gold pieces is a bit of a chore, but required for the later stages of the game. But trading rainbow drops for treasure location does help quite a bit. Quite handy to be able to reach save points, so you don't have to start at the beginning of the stage. The difficulty tends to be hard at the start, then gets a little easier, then harder again. Overall, very happy with the purchase.