alfredofroylan on 12 October 2008
Some issues from the Review:
The controls and the lives system, however, are not. Sackboys are fun to manipulate, especially the puppeteering you can do with their facial expressions and gestures, but also just their easy, bouncing joie-de-vivre. But there's the slightest lack of precision and definition to the floaty jump, a hint of stickiness, the timing's off by a fraction of a fraction of a second. When the game presents you with exacting challenges of dexterity and timing, as it occasionally does, that's a minor annoyance. When it's combined with the vague, slow and over-zealously auto-corrected movement between the game's three planes of depth, it's a problem.
And
Issues with control and checkpointing spoil the party a little, but only that much.
Then there's the checkpoint lives system, which gives you an infinite number of lives for a level, but only three (or on too-rare occasions, six) for any given checkpoint. Although checkpoints are generously and well placed, three lives just aren't enough for some of the harder sections, and if you lose them all, it's back to the start of the level. Abandoning lives completely would have stripped all the tension out of the game, but this inflexible system creates half a dozen chokepoints of almost unbearable, teeth-grinding irritation that simply didn't need to be there.
Then there's the checkpoint lives system, which gives you an infinite number of lives for a level, but only three (or on too-rare occasions, six) for any given checkpoint. Although checkpoints are generously and well placed, three lives just aren't enough for some of the harder sections, and if you lose them all, it's back to the start of the level. Abandoning lives completely would have stripped all the tension out of the game, but this inflexible system creates half a dozen chokepoints of almost unbearable, teeth-grinding irritation that simply didn't need to be there.
