The one bright spot is the fun dance numbers and cinematics, but that doesn’t save Balan Wonderworld. In other games you can look at a set of puzzles and understand what you need to do, but this is rare in Balan. The levels are actually so nondescript that it makes navigating and placing yourself in the environment feel like a chore.

It tries to pass off giant floating assets as artistic design. I’ve never seen anything like this before, and it makes it feel like I’m playing a prototype. NPCs often dance around stages as you play, but they disappear if you go in for a closer look. Your character’s running animation is loose and disconnected from her actual movements. It’s colorful and crisp enough on a stream, but everything else is disappointing or even incomplete.

I don’t like the way the game looks and sounds. You need to leave the level and start it over again from the beginning to get another attempt. Oh, and if you don’t get Excellent on one of the prompts in a Balan’s Bout, you cannot simply retry. This also gets more difficult later in the game. And as a kicker, you only get the Balan Statue (which you need to progress) if you get Excellent timing throughout the Bout. You will spend multiple minutes just staring and waiting for your chance to press a button. These special stages get longer and longer in the later levels. Instead, you only need to watch these cutscenes so that you can press a button the moment that two identical pictures line up correctly.īalan’s Bouts start off boring and distracting, and somehow they get worse as the game progresses. But you don’t control the Balan’s flight. These are the sections that have Balan flying around like a Nights game. But this is a meaningless distraction.īut perhaps the most offensive aspect of Balan Wonderworld are the bonus Balan’s Bout challenges. The only stated objective the game gives you in the user interface is a command to build a “tower o’ Tims” by feeding collectible gems to the fuzzy Tim creatures. It does not say what those things are, and that’s how I ended up lost for a half-hour.īalan Wonderworld is truly disrespectful of the player’s time. Instead, a meter on the pause screen displays what you need (say, 15 of 25 things) for a train. What’s even more infuriating is that the game does not tell you that you need these statues to progress. These hard gates are how the game goes from what should be 5 hours to beat to something closer to 12 hours to finish. They are well hidden and often require suits from other stages to unlock. And it’s not like these easy-to-find collectibles that you get while playing through a level. And you will need 50, 80, and 110 statues before you can fully beat the game. To go unlock levels 4, 5, and 6, you need 25 Balan statues. That is thoughtless to the point of cruelty, and I would expect any player of any age to feel frustrated in that situation.Ībsurd progression that is disrespectful of the player’s timeīalan Wonderworld’s developers gated progression behind difficult-yet-inane collectibles to justify its $60 price. The game occasionally puts you in a situation where you need to jump and the only suit you have cannot jump. This simplicity might sound wonderful for young players, but that is not the case. Swapping out costumes is not possible in the air, and even when you’re on the ground, the process takes a few seconds. The action can never get too complex, because you often can not jump and attack at the same time. This foundation is rotten, and the rest of the game falls apart on top of it. Otherwise, A, B, X, Y, LT, and RT are all jump - or they are all attack if your suit has that capability (but then that probably means you cannot jump anymore). Every button on the gamepad does the same thing, with the exception of the left and right bumpers to switch between costumes. Jumping is also all the main character can do. Jumping is floaty and running is slow but also slippery. Register Here Baffling, slippery controlsīalan Wonderworld doesn’t feel good to play. Join gaming leaders live this October 25-26 in San Francisco to examine the next big opportunities within the gaming industry.

Balan wonderworld switch review