fun ass game like sonic mania

<h1>A great game with a few minor hiccups that remind me of yesteryear.</h1>
As someone who played the original Sonic Advance titles when I was a kid, this one felt very much so inspired by that series. The momentum of Spark, the dashes, the attacks, they were instantly familiar yet different enough to make them novel. Overall, I recommend this game but I wanted to air out a few issues I had with the game since I'm here.

As much as I liked a lot of the power-ups for Spark, many of them felt necessary in certain stages. There was a few stages in a row where I just so happened to never run into any, either because the levels themselves didn't have any or I just missed them since they're treated a little bit like secrets from time to time. This led to a few frustrating levels where I had none of the mobility-focussed power-ups and the stage clearly thought I should've. With Spark's momentum-based movement, precision platforming never felt as solid as the speed sections or when I was blasting through areas by chaining together attacks and dashes.

Speaking of the dash move, it has this weird momentum locking that was never quite satisfying. I think it's in place so you don't build up insane amounts of speed from nowhere, but then you run into situations where dashing at the wrong time kills all your speed, of which then you can't run up certain obstacles without spamming the dash button, which got old as the game went on. Probably a skill issue, but I can't imagine why the dash move was designed to have that limitation.

I enjoyed the various move sets that you can get as Spark, and like games like Kirby, some are more fleshed out than others, some are more useful, some feel required, etc. You can't really avoid that when you try to have such a diverse set of powers. However, something that was consistent across nearly all of them was a need to mash the attack button at some point. It got so bad my thumbs started to cramp during boss fights, so I wound up making a button mashing macro on my Steam Deck, which fixed the issue for the most part.

While I'm at it, I know this game was released many years before the steam deck, so I can't really fault it for this, but the pause menu has a visual glitch where it flickers the entire screen. It's like there's some gentle flicker effect that's getting exaggerated 100x, making it almost impossible to read the help text that's there for each power. It's genuinely a photosensitivity/epilepsy issue that should probably be looked into.

Other than all of that, the music was banging, the platforming was fun, the combat was varied and interesting, and I had an alright time with the first unlockable character despite some minor criticisms with combat and damage balancing, with some bosses taking ages to kill despite knowing their patterns. I only really played this as part of the Spark bundle I picked up, and had zero expectations since I really only had a knowledge of the third game. I literally knew nothing about this game, didn't even look at the store page before launching it and giving it a try, and I'm glad I did. I think it was a fun little retro romp with just a few of the classic retro blunders, easily worth it's $8 asking price, even more so if it's on sale. Looking forward to now moving onto the second game and seeing Spark in 3D!

This game isn't bad per se, but so far it's just been really boring. The gameplay is bizarre mashup of Sonic & Kirby with momentum-based level design and powerups with different elements and movesets. The problem is that there's no special stages or any kind of collectible to my knowledge, so the alternate routes and speed sections feel arbitrarily there to reference Sonic rather than being there as an extension of the design. The levels all just go on forever too with a consistently 12 minute runtime despite me simply trying to find my way to the end.

The powerups are also not copy abilities from the scant enemies that appear, and they feel randomly strewn around the levels without any strong purpose. In Kirby the levels are always tightly designed with whichever powerups you have access to in mind for combat and puzzles. The powerups themselves also just feel redundant. Most of them effectively do the same thing with the majority having a version of the same melee attack reskinned with a different animation. The only powerups that felt like they were actually related to the level design were the fire and ice powers which allow you to bypass obstacles like lava and water.

I haven't finished yet, but the bosses have been pathetic so far. There's no touch damage which is a huge positive, but the bosses have a lot of pauses as if there is touch damage. So, you can just stand inside their sprite and attack them over and over. Outisde of the intro boss, the level minibosses have just melted so far.

I can at least say that the art and animation are super solid, and the soundtrack is fantastic as well with its mix of disco tunes, rock, and electronic beats. That seems to be one thing consistent throughout all of Feperd's games. I don't know, maybe this is worth it for $8, but it really feels like an amateur fangame. And it's weird that it feels like that because Feperd is a veteran fangame developer, having done Sonic BTS and ATS. You would think that the design would be a little stronger with some games already under their belt by the time they released this. I'm looking forward to playing the sequels, but I don't think it's necessary to go back and play this game based on my experience. I don't even know that I want to actually finish it myself.