Review for Balan wonderworld. Game for PC, PlayStation 4, Nintendo Switch, PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X, the video game was released on 26/03/2021
Writing the review of Balan Wonderworld is very difficult, destabilizing, every word inked like a stab in the heart, considering what could have been and what was not, given the pedigree of the work encoded by Arzest, Yuji Naka and all those hardworking minds capable of giving birth to playful mythological creatures such as Final Fantasy and Sonic the Hedgehog.
EpicTrick would like, for a moment only, to have the ability to transform itself in the same way as the protagonists of the creature under review, becoming a simulacrum of that Atari who in 1983 or so headed to New Mexico to bury thousands of unsold cartridges. And yes, because Balan Wonderworld, instead of aiming to revive the glories of a genre, the platform one, recently honored by great achievements such as, one above all, Crash Bandicoot 4: It's About Time, summarizes everything that an exponent of the genre should not do. Balan Wonderworld is a title to simply forget.
Although the story behind the entire story would seem perfectly in line with expectations, crossing the festive atmosphere of a brilliant musical with that sense of melancholy and deep sadness similar to that found in NiGHTS Into Dreams, the main stimulant of the release of drops of tear secretion from the eyelid rhyme is not the atmosphere permeating every single bit of Balan Wonderworld, but its played part, as outlined in the rest of the review.
Pad in hand and sanded the cartoonish appearance, in fact, the title of BALAN COMPANY appears in all its mechanical soporific based on the slow exploration of Levels characterized by a flat design, monochord, without twists. The introduction of about eighty collectible costumes, each guardian of a main characteristic capable of enabling some actions otherwise impossible to perform, fails in the truly difficult task of adequately differentiating the rhythm of a production characterized by a series of challenges. characterized by an appeal and difficulty rate practically close to absolute zero.
The possibility of acquiring these costumes in the course of the adventure opens the door to the need to retrace one's steps and fully complete a previous level through the skill just acquired, adding a tad of longevity to the entire platformic epic.
As per tradition, the various levels are often interspersed with boss fights which, theoretically, should take both hands from the playful plot of the video game and envelop the homo ludens in their sprawling coils: these parts are regularly manned by enemies with predictable and obvious attack patterns, uninteresting and elementary in their extreme basicity. And it matters little that the character design is at least in line with the stylistic features of Yuji Naka's productions, when boredom quickly intervenes with a straight leg on the lower limbs of the defenseless gamer, breaking down any completeness ambitions.
Not even the cosmetics department of Balan Wonderworld can trace it back, considering how even in the tested version, the PlayStation 5, there is no lack of technical problems. Considering the small number of polygons moved on the screen and the limited special effects that frequent the scenes moved on the screen by the game engine, the presence of slowdown, tearing and virtual camera arranging represent a very unenviable business card for the work produced by Square Enix.
The presence of a local multiplayer mode, which allows a second player to take part in the game, hard to convince and it turns out to be only a pale palliative designed for those who want to face the stages of Balan Wonderworld as a couple. The only really comforting note of the title and the entire review is the sound department: some melodies proposed in the middle of the action are adequately catchy and particularly suitable for the dreamy atmospheres that are the background to the whole production.
A pleasant note of the PlayStation 5 version is certainly that of the use of adaptive triggers of DualSense: although not really game changing, the use on triggers of different levels of resistance related to each costume used, however, represents a nice implementation. It should be noted that the use of the backbones is absolutely optional, as the same actions can be performed through the front buttons of the Sony controller.
Balan Wonderworld embodies, within its chromosomal set, everything that a platformer shouldn't offer. Slow, boring and uninteresting, the new work of Yuji Naka disappoints and is proposed, in its own right, as a candidate for the little coveted prize of the biggest videogame disappointment of the year.
► Balan Wonderworld is a Platform-type game developed and published by Square Enix for PC, PlayStation 4, Nintendo Switch, PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X, the video game was released on 26/03/2021
