Reviews List - Delicious Fruit

Xplayerlol
For: I Dun Wanna be Anything 2

Rating based on version 1.0.
Really long and really fun game. Follows the first IDWBA's storyline, expanding it and solidifying it, taking itself fairly more seriously than its prequel (Although it still keeps a fair share of humor, specially in the ending). There are lots of differences from this game to its prequel, the vast majority of them being for the better.
The first main difference is the lack of traps. There is an annoying enemy that goes by the name of "Kamikaze" that works like a trap at some points, but he's exclusive of very few areas, isn't overused and hardly is unfairly placed (It's rare to see one of those near the end of saves, and usually it's possible to react to their sudden appearances and avoid them in time). This makes the platforming much more enjoyable, as your time will be spent on figuring out how to deal with each gimmick and each puzzle, rather than on remembering where is every single trap on the save you are at.
Another big difference is that now the Kid has an attributes system. You can raise your attack power, or your 'guts'. Your attack power determines how much damage your bullets deliver to your enemies, and increasing it becomes really useful as you progress through the game and the bosses get harder and tougher. Your guts are an RNG thing that, when triggered, grants the Kid a short period of invulnerability that you can use to skip some segments, or to save yourself from tight situations. The 'guts' have a low chance of being triggered each time an attack hits the Kid, and raising this attribute will increase the player's chance of triggering them. Also, your reset key is blocked while this ability is triggered, which is really useful, after all you wouldn't want to reset out of panic when the game is giving you a second chance. To upgrade these attributes, you need to find specific upgrade items that can be found scattered through the huge amounts of platforming screens. These items include attack and guts upgrades and coins that you can use at the Trading Corner.
There are multiple weapons that you can find through the game. Some of them are required to progress, while some are optional and only useful to help you with specific situations. Some enemies and bosses are weak against a specific weapon, and some weapons have different effects at specific objects (Breakable blocks, fire/ice totems, water and others).
The Trading Corner is also a lot more useful than in the first game. In the first game, most items you find in the trading corner are collectibles without much relevance for the gameplay, but here, you can exchange your coins for set unknown prizes that include attribute upgrades, weapon(s) that can't be obtained normally, extra ammunition for this/these weapon(s) and probably more.
The stages are all connected through specific paths, with lots of room for exploring. To ensure that the player can be transported quickly to distant locations, there are multiple teleporters scattered through the game. The stages have numerous themes, including a swamp, a tower, an underwater temple, a beehive and many others. The visuals are impressive (In a good way) and the musics are nice and fitting. To ensure that the player can't access areas that are probably too hard for him at the moment, some stages have specific requirements that the player needs to meet in order to unlock them, like amounts of Power Capsules (Usually found at the very end of an area) in order to measure how far you are into the game or specific weapons that you'll probably need to use inside the stage too.
Another huge difference from the original are the bosses. The bosses in this game use a set pattern, which makes the player focus more on learning the fight instead of focusing on getting lucky. They are usually quite creative, forcing the player to adapt to entirely different styles of fight. There are some exceptions, like the dragon, which is basically all about finding safe spots while you either, take forever to kill him with normal bullets, or kill him within 5 hits with ice bullets, and the spider, which is a huge RNG festival that would probably fit better in the prequel, but most bosses are fun and really creative, or at least decent.
The main issue I have with this game regards its open world nature. In a game where you can basically go wherever you want to (Kinda), you'd expect to know where exactly you want to go, so that you can spend your time exploring the areas, rather than, uh, finding them. It took me forever to find some specific areas because they were hidden at places where I'd expect to find a secret item, not a stage. Even better than that, the Lost Manor (An annoying stage consisting of a maze of warps) has two correct paths, each of them leading to a different stage. How is anyone supposed to find out that the Lost Manor leads to two different stages? You have to explore every corner and hope for it to be a new area, instead of a secret coin or upgrade, otherwise you'll have wasted a fair share of your time just redoing a part of a stage you've already played until you reach the next teleporter. Even better than that, the path to the last stages is blocked by a weird kind of barrier and there's no real way to know when you unlocked it, specially because there's no way to know that that's the path to the last stages until you enter it. There's a reason for maps and hints to exist in video games, and that reason is usually to show the player where can he go and where should he go, so that the optional paths can honor their name and BE optional, and so that the player KNOWS that they are optional.
The vast majority of the gimmicks is greatly improved. The platforming still has a lot of variety, and there are still plenty of gimmicks, but I can only recall two annoying gimmicks: The honey gimmick, which slows down the player and makes him jump lower (It's used in an interesting way, but makes the platforming way too slow), and the invisible/fake block maze thing (The save with shiny green blocks where you can't step at the visible blocks, although they can still block your way horizontally, and the blocks you can step at are invisible until you get REALLY close to them). The rest of them is quite interesting and fun to use.
The only real complaint I have about this game is the lack of a system that allows the player to know what is optional and what is required, which is a pretty basic feature in games with extra content. I really liked the platforming, the bosses and the style of the game overall. Would recommend.

Delicious Fruit

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