Balan Wonderworld, the whimsical new action-platformer from Sonic the Hedgehog and NiGHTs co-creators Yuji Naka and Naoto Ohshima, is getting a sizeable demo next Thursday, 28th January, ahead its full launch in March.
Next week’s demo launches on all platforms and looks to be a bit of a whopper, promising two hours of play, either solo or with a friend in local co-op, across the opening acts of three worlds.
The first of these takes place on a beautiful farm woven from the memories of a farmer whose cornfield is struck by a storm, while another - formed of bicycle parts and drifting islands - is “born from the heart of Chang Haoyu and his love of the open sky”.
The demo’s final world - a town where a character once met a cute kitten - is made of candy pieces, floating books, and mysterious buildings full of moving gears, and there’s also a chance to explore the Isle of Tims, a hub area where players can harvest magical droplets to evolve the abilities of its resident creatures for use elsewhere.
The full version of Balan Wonderworld launches on 26th March.
Overall movement feels a bit bad. You don’t move very fast, and there’s only one action per persona. So for example, if you are using a transformation that shoots you can’t jump, and there’s a somewhat lengthy animation to change the transformation, so overall just getting around doing stuff feels like a slide show XD
Granted this is just a demo and I only passed the first stage, but it felt completely devoid of any challenge as well. Both enemies and platforming are super basic and it doesn’t work that well as a collectathon because of the slow/poor movement.
(But I’m willing to give a try and finish the whole demo to see if there’s any sign of improvements later on).
Oh, there’s another issue as well. Either a stuttering or a frame pacing, but it’s pretty constant on the SX. You can tell the game targets 60fps but it never delivers it smoothly (which is surprising because the game looks super basic graphically)
I pretty much agree with everything you said. I really would have enjoyed a challenge, but it’s even easier than Mario Oddysey. And yep, far from stable performance. Really should be just smooth sailing all around.
Yeah, I didn’t really feel the demo aswell. It is so odd how every single button in my controller does the same action. Not to mention it takes an unnecessary amount of time to switch between personas.
I’m a tad disappointed by the demo although the art style and the fact it’s made by Yuji Naka means I’m still willing to pay full price for it at release as I have a lot of faith it’ll be at least a 7 in the end and that’s good enough for me.
