You can also pick them up, although I’m not sure why. The Isle of Tims is cute while there’s little to do there in the demo, you can use your collected drops to feed the little creatures known as Tims. For example, one level has platforms rise up or the land curve downward as you approach, which at first seems to be only an aesthetic touch until you need to guide a giant ball to the correct area of the stage in order to open a door. On the other hand, the worlds themselves are bright and colorful, with some areas changing as you walk through them. The demo’s sole boss stage was also fairly bland, with it simply requiring you to hit the boss three times, although you get statues for attacking with different costumes. At first I thought it was a cute change of pace, until I found an identical Balan Bout in a later act. There are also golden top hats to find, which trigger a mini-game called “Balan Bout.” This is a QTE sequence in which you must press a button when Balan overlaps with his silhouette, or mash the button when multiple copies of Balan appear on-screen. Once you collect a certain number of statues, Balan will open the way to a new world for you, so seeking out statues in each level seems like the main form of progression. There are little gem-like drops scattered throughout each level, as well as the Balan statues that are your main goal. That’s fine, but it does slow down the pace of the game.īalan Wonderworld is fairly generous about putting a costume nearby when you’ll need it to proceed, but you’ll need to use a variety of costumes if you want to get all of the collectibles. All of the face buttons do the same thing, and you need to switch costumes to change which ability you have access to. At first, I assumed different buttons would be assigned to different costume functions, but that’s not true. You also lose your current costume if you take damage, which leads to a bit of tedium if you decide to backtrack to grab the costume again. You can only have three at a time, and getting a new one pushes out the last one in your list. In the demo, I got to try out a form with a spin attack, another with a ground-pound move, one that could float through the air, and many others. In your basic human form (whose appearance you choose at the start), you can’t do much of anything, but each costume lets you transform into a different form. The gameplay revolves around getting costumes that give you new abilities. Performance on the Switch version isn’t great, and the frame rate struggles at times, but I didn’t find it to be too much of a problem. It’s a surprisingly sizable demo that lets you play through Acts 1 and 2 of Chapter 1, as well as its boss fight, Act 1 of Chapter 4, and Act 1 of Chapter 6, in addition to the hub world called the Isle of Tims. A demo is now available, so I checked it out to see what this new game from Yuji Naka and Square Enix is like. I love 3D platformers, especially of the collect-a-thon variety, so I’ve been interested in Balan Wonderworld ever since it was first announced.
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