A rhythm platformer is not what I’d have expected from a League of Legends spinoff, but it is a good fit for Hextech Mayhem’s star character, the hyperactive, bomb-obsessed Ziggs. The game has you pressing or holding one of three buttons along with the music to jump, ground-pound, and bomb your way through chaotic levels full of obstacles, enemies, and collectibles. When you get into its flow, particularly in later, more complex levels, it’s quite fun.

Completing the levels as asked is basically the game’s normal difficulty, but its initially-hidden ask is for you to look past the “notes” as written on screen. With opportunities for additional destruction and collectibles filling each level, the game attempts to create a somewhat improvisational feel once you’re comfortable with the main path. In reality it is already kinda rigidly defined, just hard to see, and after completing the last level you can unlock the complete 100% path for display as actual notes. Kinda liked that more.

Beyond this somewhat hidden stuff that’s hard to grasp in the moment, the visual communication generally felt like one of the game’s biggest issues for me. I had the most difficulty at first just gauging the timing of inputs and dealing with the game’s weird control scheme. Everything felt somehow too zoomed out and spread out to clearly parse what’s going on, not to mention distracting animations everywhere. Games like Rayman Legends and Muse Dash offered what I felt were much more intuitive and clear takes on a similar musically-timed experience.

I was not a huge fan of how the levels stop and jump you ahead when you make a mistake, since it broke the flow a bit. All these things I’ve mentioned combine to make Hextech Mayhem’s levels much more fun to replay than to play for the first time, where they feel a bit awkward to get through. Fine, as that adds value, but I think the problem with that is the music and visuals, while totally nice and adequate, are so similar that everything blends together and gets old after a while. The game reeeally needs some differently-themed worlds or something, maybe in a sequel.

Similarly one-note is the story, which is fine but pretty barebones for a game with Story literally in its title. In addition to 4 nicely-animated cutscenes, there are lots of little dialogue snippets in levels and loading screens. It certainly becomes a bit repetitive, and I’d have preferred they spread out the budget a bit more evenly and have a bit more of interest going on.

This is a good time, definitely short and simple, but for the budget price they’re asking I think this was decently executed. I think this is a fun proof of concept for something truly great to be made down the line, and for totally different kinds of experiences to be made from League’s wide range of characters.