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Sacred Reviews: Super Candyland Cousin Adventure

Intro

"Super Candyland Cousin Adventure" was developed by djbeardo as a Christmas gift for his nieces and nephews. And while I can appreciate the spirit that drove djbeardo to make this game. The underlying game itself is horrifyingly weak in terms of gameplay. So much so, I imagine my gameplay section will dwarf every other part of this review by a large margin.

Story

Story wise the game is pretty simple with you trying to free your cousins and siblings from the control of the evil Grandma Witch. An evil grandma whose also stolen your birthday money and bedtime books in order to enrich her own life at your expense. As such your going to need to jump and shoot lasers out of your eyes in order to save your precious books and put the evil Grandma Witch in her place.

Gameplay

"Super Candyland Cousin Adventure" suffers from a plethora of issues in terms of gameplay. In fact, I'd say the biggest issue is that the characters feel excessively difficult to control. This is because the characters are rather slippy/floaty and tend to not respond as precisely to inputs as they should. On the plus side djbeardo is fully aware of this issue and would like to address it. Unfortunately it appears that he isn't sure how to address this issue since the plugins he used hasn't been fully tested and fine tuned at this point if his comments are anything to go by.

author=djbeardo
I agree that the characters are a little slippy and floaty. You know, I could never really figure out how to fix that with the platformer plugin settings. I would encourage anyone who wants to give making a platformer with the TMJumpAction plugin a try to let me know if they can figure out how to make things less floaty and slippy.

Since Super Candyland Cousin Adventure is the only full game I've seen made with the plugin, I'm hoping people can download it and look under the hood and use it to make their own platformers even better.


I suppose I can appreciate djbeardo's hopes that this game will inspire others to look into fine tuning the plugin in question in order to churn out superior platformers in the future, but I can't help but dislike the loose nature of the controls in this game.

Another issue with the controls in my opinion is that your jumps are always fully powered whether you smash the button on the keyboard or barely press it. As a result it's a lot harder to get through tight areas with certain characters like the dragon whose jump height is absolutely massive. Thankfully you can switch between characters as you progress through the game in order to bypass this issue, but it does make for some annoying situations if you pick certain stages early on.

To make matters worse the game makes getting the true ending a bit more difficult than needed in my opinion. In order to get the game's true ending you need to collect a series of books as you free your cousins from the control of the Evil Witch. A task made difficult by the fact that each stage requires a specific character in order to clear out obstacles in order to reach the books in question. And since you can't replay stages you need to either guess this order from the start or be willing to repeatedly play the game in order to start mapping out which characters you need for which stages.

I suppose you could hope you get lucky on your first guess, but seeing as how you can't save on the stage select screen. You'll need to save before facing the boss of a stage in order to give yourself room for more guesses. And as you can imagine needing to beat the same boss multiple times in order to find the correct path is rather annoying. Even if most of the bosses can be readily beaten by simply spamming the attack button.

And to finish this series of flaws on a more minor note I also find it a bit disappointing that the final boss is noticeably weaker than the dreaded uncles that try to work the player over at the same time. This makes them a lot more difficult to deal with since it's harder to get hits in without being hit yourself.

But to end on a more positive note the game's final stage tries to incorporate elements from all of the previous stages as well as include sections where the player can jump up through tanks of water in order to find pathways for the various playable characters. This gives you a lot more options for advancing than you'd expect and makes for a more enjoyable stage in my opinion since your not as constrained on who you should use.

Graphics

On a nicer note the game is rather cute and colorful. A decision that makes a lot sense considering the target audience. As such, I really don't have anything negative to say about this aspect of the game.

Conclusion

While the spirit that drove djbeardo to make this game is admirable. The underlying game itself suffers from to many flaws in order to be considered good, but I'm willing to cut this game some slack in terms of my overall score because of djbeardo's intentions. As such, I'd suggest taking my final score with a grain of salt. That being said I'd suggest giving this game a pass unless your a die hard fan of platformers or the game itself has undergone a major overhaul in order to address the issues with the controls.

Posts

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Thanks so much for your review!

I know this game isn't much, but it was nice pressing RPGMaker into making a platformer and playing around with the platformer plugin.

I wanted to let you know that I was able to find a setting to reduce the slippiness. There's a tiny setting in the plugin that changes the friction of surfaces. The default setting is 0.001 and I found that raising it to 0.1 makes things a lot different. The jumps are still a little floaty... I'd love to hear a fix for that.

I should also note that my game was a tiny hit with my nieces, who range from 5 to 8. My nephew, who always wanted to play the robot first, had a really bad time since the robot is essentially "hard mode." But hey, for goofing around with on Christmas morning, the kids liked it fine. And my sisters, who were completely against video games prior to this, have really loosened up about it (I think quarantine has helped...) and the kids have moved on to some real games on their ipads! More gamers into the fold!
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