Bubsy: The Woolies Strike Back

[h1]Nothing went wrong, but nothing went well either[/h1] A modern revival of a mascot platformer from the 90's almost nobody asked for, this 2D installment doesn't really do anything you haven't seen before if you're at all familiar with the genre. To start with the things I liked, you can pan the camera in any direction with the right stick, a feature I wish was implemented in more 2D platformers nowadays. Controls are much tighter so you should have a lot less issues lining up jumps even if they're much more simplified and lack the depth of other games in the genre. I never had issues with enemy visibility. There's a tutorial level at the start, but unless you're going for 100% it's entirely optional. The one new move that was added is the pounce, which I personally didn't enjoy using very much. This hurls you in a rather unpredictable manner, resulting in missed jumps or accidentally hitting something you didn't mean to. I only ever used it when I absolutely had to, such as the final section in the first level requiring you to pounce through breakable blocks over a pit of water which was the only part of this entire game that gave me trouble as I kept hitting the ceiling above me. Otherwise, I mainly rely on regular jumps and the glide move. I thought this game looked... passable. Nothing special, but not awful. It just looks so uninspired and generic, with nothing creative or unique going for any of its environments. Even the unique death animations from the earlier games are gone entirely, taking away one of the very few things that made those games stand out from others in the genre. There is, however, one major issue I've run into that hinders my enjoyment of the entire game for me, that being how some objects fail to render on-screen properly. This includes level collectables, enemy projectiles and boss attacks. How am I supposed to avoid them when I can't even see them? I've tried changing every graphics setting possible, yet nothing worked. I was able to remedy this somewhat by pausing the game, but even that only fixes it partially. If you're any good at these games, you should have no issues beating this. Level design is fairly basic with not much in the way of challenge. You start each level with 9 lives - similar to the first game and the one on Atari Jaguar, you die in one hit but unlike those games, you can collect a shield that protects you from a single hit. The game tries to offer extra stuff to do, but even this area falls flat for me. Each level has a badge you can get for collecting all 5 keys in a level to open the vault near or at the end of a level which are fairly easy to find. There's one for reaching the end on a single life which is also easy for every level if you're ignoring everything. And another for finding every shirt which is annoying since the game doesn't keep track of how many you've collected; you have to keep count yourself. These grant absolutely nothing outside of achievements BTW. What really kills this game for me, however, is the incredibly short length. There are only 14 levels including 3 bosses split across 3 themed areas and you can easily finish it in about 1-2 hours, 3 if you're going for 100% achievements. This makes it incredibly overpriced for how little content you're getting here. For the same price, you could buy Sonic Mania, or either of the first two Trine games which also offer a lot more content and replay value. It's not even bad like the old Bubsy games were, just aggressively mediocre, bland and forgettable. Yeah, I'm keeping this one fairly short as there really is not much to talk about here - it's nothing more than bargain bin fodder at best, and is not worth picking up when there are so many other far better games in the genre available right now.

Bubsy <3

the games shaders made all the enemies and collectibles invisible terrible ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ game

89 minutes to reach the end credits. What a joke.

What could pawssibly go wrong? No idea how I'm doing this, but I like it!

Bobcat glides and bounces Woolies stole the golden fleece Yarn balls pave the way

Well yeah it's better than any other bubsy games, but it's so short, it's winds up being just mediocre 2D platformer than an actually a game about Bubsy. Also, still-image cutscenes sucks, what were they thinking about?