![]() The only way for the player to fully understand the story is to read the companion novel released on the same day as the game. Supposedly, the story revolves around your character helping other people restore their hopes and dreams by guiding them down the right path and freeing them from the darkness in their heart instilled by the villain Lance. The story is almost non-existent and is only barely implied through small cutscenes that usually occur at the beginning and end of a set of levels. Players can stock up multiple power-ups and change between them at any given time, but this requires the character to completely freeze and complete a second and a half long animation for changing costumes which completely stops the momentum of platforming. Without a power-up, all four face buttons cause the character to jump and with a power-up all four buttons use the special move, removing your ability to jump in the process. Rather than assign different actions to each individual button, rather, the game uses all four buttons for the same action. On a controller, a developer has the choice of four different face buttons to choose from to assign different actions. Yet, even the power-ups make the game more tedious and limited than it already was. The only instructions given to the player are how to use the various power-up costumes that are collected in the different levels. Upon entering the stage, players are not given any direction and are expected to fumble their way through lackluster platforming and figure out the destination for themselves. This quality disappears after about three minutes when the cutscene ends and players are thrown into a hub world with little to no explanation about any of their objectives other than going to the level select and entering the first stage. The game starts up nicely with a well-polished, clean cutscene as is expected from Square Enix games. Upon release, what was advertised as a full $60 AAA game contained the polish and quality of a $5 shovelware platforming game. Usually, this lack of publicity is due to a publisher’s expectations of failure for a project. Not much gameplay was shown off during development and there was very little fanfare leading up to the game’s release. The game’s art style also seemed reminiscent of the Sega Dreamcast cult class “Nights into Dreams,” leading to speculation that the game would be a spiritual successor of sorts. Initially, when the project was first teased, Square Enix fans were excited as Yuji Naka, lead programmer of “Sonic the Hedgehog” and Naoto Ohshima, designer of the titular hedgehog, were in charge of direction and character design. Released on March 26, “Balan Wonderworld” is a multi-platform developed by Square Enix. ![]() That is not how “Balan Wonderworld” operates. However, most of the time this expense is made up for by the quality and duration of the game in question. The Twitter account for the game has gained 13,000 subscribers.Spending money on most AAA games seems like it can cost an arm and a leg for college students with a $60 price tag. A subreddit for the game created July 22nd, 2020 has accumulated 300 subscribers. Game Rant wrote, "many of the accounts being used to write these perfect score user reviews are new and have only written a review for Balan Wonderworld and nothing else." The suspected bots were caught by on Twitter (shown below).īalan Wonderworld has not developed a significant online presence. ![]() Noisy Pixel gave the game a 5/10, writing, " Balan Wonderworld falls short on all gameplay fronts, making it a mostly unfun title with a criminal amount of missed opportunities."Ĭuriously, the game's Metacritic page is suspected to have been anti-review bombed, with a bevy of vaguely written positive user reviews on its Metacritic page. Screenrant gave the game 2/5 stars, bemoaning the game's lack of story and uninspired levels, which players will have to backtrack through in order to 100% complete the game. As of March 30th, 2021, the game has a score of 58 on Metacritic. The game released on March 26th, 2021.īalan Wonderworld released to mostly mixed and negative reviews. The game marks the pair's first collaboration since 1998's Sonic Adventure, leading to considerable anticipation around Balan Wonderworld. Naka is the creator of Sonic the Hedgehog, and Naoto Ohshima would be working as the lead artist. It was created by Yuji Naka of Balan Company, a Square Enix subsidiary. The game promised to be a retro 3D-style platformer. Balan Wonderworld was announced on July 23rd, 2020 (trailer shown below).
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