BALAN WONDERWORLD REVIEWS FULL
BALAN WONDERWORLD REVIEWS SERIES

These are amateurish missteps, which is baffling given the big names attached to “Balan Wonderworld.” I’m all for innovation when it produces entertainment value, but this clunky and unintuitive system means you can’t creatively string together moves, ruining any chance for the game to have depth. That’s a veritable light-year by platformer standards, which traditionally reward quick thinking and good coordination. Some costumes don’t even allow players to jump, and you have to stand in place for two seconds to switch between costumes. The trouble is each costume has just one action button. Some are tailored toward combat like shooting fireballs, while others are based around exploration such as a hovering jump. Players switch between costumes, such as a wolf or dragon, to access different abilities. “Balan Wonderworld” is conceptually sound enough, but it fundamentally falls flat on its face with regards to actual moment-to-moment gameplay.

So far, I’ve described a game that fails to be unique but sounds passable. It’s a standard 3D “collect-athon” platformer, wherein gamers explore an open playing field to look for trinkets and tokens to unlock additional stages. The character models and textures are vibrant but look barely any crisper than a mid-00’s Nintendo GameCube title. Perhaps a better name would be “ Bland Wonderworld” because aside from some very impressive cinematic cutscenes, the game is shockingly bereft of inspiration. I spent a couple of hours with the demo on Xbox One and, honestly, I couldn’t wait to go back to playing something else.

BALAN WONDERWORLD REVIEWS FULL

The game won’t release in full until March 26, but a substantial demo was made available to download on most platforms as of Jan. One example will almost certainly be “Balan Wonderworld,” a musically inspired 3D platformer with happy-go-lucky visuals and plenty of Japanese anime inspiration. Development teams have to shift priorities and often initially struggle to take full advantage of the new hardware.

BALAN WONDERWORLD REVIEWS SERIES

I’m not surprised – the Xbox Series X|S and PlayStation 5 were released in November, and, in the past 15 years, it seems there are rarely killer apps immediately available for brand new game consoles. Call me a pessimist, but so far 2021 isn’t shaping up to be the best year for video games.

Balan wonderworld reviews