The art style is so spot on, it's insane. Its remarkable how authentic it is to the period it's inspired by. However, that's the best thing it has going for it. For a cross between a platformer and a shooter, this doesn't do a great job. It's very unreliable and imprecise. In a genre where pattern recognition is of high importance, this does a terrible job of making patterns and telegraphing them. I don't even find the game all that difficult, but instead, it fealt cheap and buggy. I want to like this game, I really do. The developers have at least proven they can make a beautiful game so whatever they come out with next, I'll pay attention. But this game was a miss for me.
The fact is, this game is great in so many ways. The animation is stunning, and the game is absolutely beautiful to look at. The soundtrack is just superb. It's a mix of old jazz and ragtime, and it truly sounds like it's from an old cartoon from 1930. However, the gameplay has some really glaring flaws, namely, it's just too difficult. Cuphead assumes everyone is some sort of master Xbox player, who is a total shut-in and devotes his life to playing video games all day. The game puts you in situations where you have a very slim chance of getting out of it without losing a health point, and you only get a few. It seems like a purposeful setup designed to hurt the player's ability to finish the level. There are no skill settings, unless you opt for the easy setting when fighting a boss. However, you don't get to finish the game if you play it on the easy setting. There is also no way to save the game as you progress through a level, which is sort of ridiculous considering how hard this game is. So, what ends up happening is that you play the same level over and over and over, and it becomes maddening, headache-inducing, and tedious. If I were ever to devote the time required to actually finish this game, I doubt I'd ever play it again, and it would take me weeks to do it.
My opinion:
1) Release a patch which allows a player to play on several different skill levels, and still allows the player to finish the game.
2) Allow saving the game while in the middle of a level, or have automatic checkpoints. If you die, give the player the choice of replaying the entire level, or starting from the last checkpoint. For instance, in the run and gun levels where you collect coins, make each coin a checkpoint. It's awfully maddening, tediously boring, and time wasting to have to go back and play an entire level all over again when I already collected 4 of 5 coins.
Other than the ridiculous difficulty and repetitiveness of Cuphead, it's a really beautiful game and truly unique.
The art and sound is amazingly top notch. Unfortunately the gameplay is some of the most average, mediocre nothingness of 2D platformers/boss rush games. Everything is so intensely shallow. The extremely few platforming levels seem to be thrown as if they either ran out budget, that seems to be most entirely spent on art and sound, or through a low effort attempt at adding variety. In addition, the difficulty was most definitely a low effort attempt at adding length to the game. Worst case, you die once or few times and in doing so you recognize a boss' pattern. Rinse and repeat every level. The game is like 3-4 hours in length, on normal. Granted, hard adds much onto this playtime even if it is lazy as hell design.
The basic mechanics are good: parrying, dashing, shooting, etc. However, the level design in the run and gun sections barely utilizes them in satisfying ways. I've never wanted Nintendo to oversee a platformer as hard as I did while playing Cuphead.
The main problem is the punishing difficulty which requires beating a level in one try. No checkpoints. When I turned the difficulty down, the game told me it didn't count and that I had to beat the boss, "the right way." 3 stage bosses (for a start) where you have 3 hits before dying and no checkpointing became so frustratingly difficult I basically gave up on this game.
There needs to be an easy mode for us "casuals" who feel that getting through a borderline cheap boss fight's multiple stages is too much hassle as a starting point of entry for a game.
Beautiful art, absolutely great soundtrack (buy it!), gameplay hard as nails. Adamantium Nails! Some unfairness is encountered in stuff in the foreground, like trees, courtains etc, making it impossible to see, and all those puffs of smoke and dust, together with filters and other visual bells and whistles, really making the screen overly crowded. The rng aspect of the game also had the potential to make me rage really, really hard. Other than that, it was great fun. Only play if you can endure some frustration, and/or if you have a controling device which is hard to break. I recommend an xbox 360 controler, despite the horrible d pad. Have fun!
