Recent reviews by Puff

this game feels cheaply thrown together (for example, UI is very unclear how much you score from each circle's revolution; big red flag) and rather blatantly wants to sell you microtransactions. instantly refunded, thanks steam!

For context, I LOVE Cuphead a lot, and I love facing high-challenge gauntlets in games like this. Enchanted Portals is indeed a shorter game, but still provides a lot of very satisfying challenge with loveable boss battles. With how much I enjoyed playing through this, I'd say this is definitely worth paying full price.

I think I beat this game in about 4-5 hours, on Normal difficulty and on Turbo mode (Turbo increases the game speed slightly). This game does not screw around difficulty-wise (as a Cuphead-like should do) even on Normal mode, and learning the strategy to beat each boss felt incredibly satisfying to me. Overcoming each boss in my playthrough felt REALLY good.

Unfortunately, the game seems to be really lacking in the sound department, with many MANY missing sound effects from start to finish. Any sounds and music you do hear sound like stock assets, so I assume the devs (which consists of only 2 VERY VERY HARD-WORKING DEDICATED INDIVIDUALS) probably just bought a sound asset pack, but it does fit the game's vibe well, thankfully.

Despite this, I sincerely had a great time with the game! The enemies and bosses have endearing character designs, they're all very well-animated (quite consistently well-animated, I should express), and they're all fun to fight. The gameplay is pretty well-designed overall as well, so it's clear as day to me that the developers did really take their time refining how the levels and bosses felt to play through,

The bosses are about what you'd expect from a 'Cuphead-like', but the levels are quite different, I should note. Interestingly, they are procedurally generated, and feel kind of like a test of your endurance. I will admit, the levels do feel quite empty as a result, and a bit overly long to get through, but I found myself quickly becoming quite forgiving about this when I ended up feeling just so excited to get to the next boss the whole time!

Obviously I'm not gonna say too much about the final boss, but it was a good challenge to overcome and it took me many attempts to finally beat. Definitely felt like a great final gauntlet and was really satisfying to finally defeat. I will 100% go for beating the game on Insane difficulty at some point soon, which I believe gives you 1 life with 0 checkpoints (1 checkpoint per world, probably?).

I don't look at the toxicity that is YouTuber game 'reviews' these days anymore (for my own sanity), so I'm not fully aware what the general consensus is, but I heard this game's gotten abused pretty badly by spiteful content creators so I decided to actually write a review for once.

To close this off, I do really want to emphasize some crucial facts here:
- The in-game credits literally just shows an illustration of the 2 developers comprising the team. JUST 2 PEOPLE MADE ALL OF THIS
- In 2020, this game had a failed Kickstarter even with a very cool trailer which showed off all the art and bosses they had so far. 3 years later, they still managed to carry the project to release anyway, so they are clearly very committed and dedicated towards this project, which is just really awesome to see.
- Again, their Kickstarter campaign FAILED. They had no crowdfunding from KS, yet they STILL delivered the game to the world. I just have so much respect for this team for not giving up on this project they loved.

- Played for 6 hours as of writing, after playing my first session of the game -

From what I've seen so far, this game is a stunning sequel to the already excellent Freedom Planet 1. If you loved FP1, you will utterly adore playing FP2.

A tricky & very fun little shmup game that will give you that "Just one more try" thirst! ☆