Game: Ororo
First Impressions:
I like the look and animations. It reminds of this old computer game where you played as a raptor with a jetpack or something.
This swim tutorial doesn’t really work, the water isn’t visible and you can't stop swimming once you start.
The tutorial area for skateboarding was pretty fun. I did have a lot of difficulty on the second rail grinding part, I think the rail should be more magnetic and harder to fall off of . I also had a tendency to start grinding just a hair too early, I think it’s not my fault, there should be some leniency
Frogman seems a lot easier on paper, but I have no idea what I’m doing. One bounce is good, but I can spam for more, smaller, bounces. Not sure if that’s a bad or good thing to spam. I’m not sure what dictates the height of a subsequent bounce.
Grappling hook was the funnest, but also pretty frustrating, the lava walls were anti-fun, and you really needed to angle your grapple carefully. Lava walls kinda sucked because they would 1 tap you instantly (with the default starting health), and the grappling points needed to be sweet spotted pretty hard. Finally made it to the boss, and the walls are level, excuse me? I didn’t finish any levels.
Afterthoughts:
Honestly, all the movement options look good, but I didn’t really enjoy them. I feel like I spent a lot of time fighting the controls instead of enjoying the movement. A lot of the puzzles of the difficulty of the puzzles were just that. There were too many parts that were dependent on sweet spot perfect control, and I was using M+KB. On top of that you die pretty easily.
What I liked:
Animations look good, and the gameplay movement options could be fun with a bit more fine-tuning. There was one part of the grappling hook level, between the lava walls, where you have to jump from one latch point to another quickly, that part worked and was fun
Things that didn’t work the way I thought they would:
I wish the cactus thing level had more half-pipes and slopped terrain to surf. The platforming sections are challenging, but they’re not fun, in the sense that I don’t get to really go wild with the movement as much as I would have liked. I would have liked it if there were parts that were there to navigate for the sheer pleasure of it, no specific challenge, just sick nasty movement fun. I guess you’re going more for the spyro design, but I would have preferred linear levels of pure platforming and movement fun.