Recent reviews by Leafia Barrett

The speed at which this game can go from intensely silly to genuinely harrowing is impressive. One moment, you're goofing around; the next, half the team is dead and you're clawing for every inch of elevation you can manage.

So, I bought this game after watching a friend play it, and for some reason this is the one that drives me to write (afaicr) review. tl;dr: the writing desperately needs a second pass at some point, but everything else is fantastic.

The gameplay is fantastic. Movement is extremely fluid and fast-paced. My hot take is Sonic wishes it did it this well. There was the occasional jank with targeting the homing attack, but it was easy to work around by just... not mashing it, and timing presses better. Couple of other tiny gripes that amount to nothing of note. Combat isn't anything especially special, but it certainly does its job perfectly well, and I can't say I have any complaints about it.

My friends described the level design as, "the dev designs levels as a fidget," because there's a LOT to each level by Sonic standards. It's as if Lake looked at the Sonic problem (how do you handle level design when you're meant to blaze through levels) and answered "Just make more level, duh," and then did it. And it's glorious.

I haven't played Spark 1 or 2, but I'm familiar with the soundtracks through the friend that showed me 3, and to anyone familiar with the series, it's probably not terribly surprising to learn that the soundtrack is, once again, absolutely fantastic.

And... then we get to the writing, and unfortunately I can't praise this as highly as the previous points. I think this needs a second pass. The worldbuilding has a lot of potential, but the execution is... I would describe it as "earnest, but leaving a lot to be desired." The dialogue is cheesy and riddled with minor punctuation and phrasing jankiness that adds up over time, and there are a couple spots that really feel like they needed a cutscene and just... didn't get one ( Flint's death in particular comes to mind). I have personal gripes with how characters were handled, but those are strictly opinion so I'll leave them out.

Overall, I consider the game worth the money I spent on it. I do wish the plot had been handled better, but the rest of the game's positives far outweigh the negatives.

A spiritual successor to the classical Paper Mario games, this improves on their formula drastically, while also having a much better plot and setting. After playing this, I don't know that I can go back to Paper Mario.