Super Panda Adventures (2014)

SPA is a game with an instant childlike charm. It has MS Paint pixel art, really light and snappy character movement, and a unique Metroidvania world structure. I was fully sold on it until certain elements began to… kinda ruin it.

The biggest one is - no map. You have an overworld map, but within each area you’re completely on your own. At first, this is fine and adds a nice challenge to the exploration. But as the game goes on, the level design increases in verticality and complexity. It ends up literally impossible to keep track of where you’ve been and where you’ve missed.

As a completionist, this slowly began to ruin the game for me. I lost motivation to explore, because I knew I would never fully find everything. This is just my preference of play style, so this might not bother everyone,

My other big gripe- the combat is super unbalanced. Enemies continuously spawn in the same area that you killed them after a small delay. This means that as you explore, you’re literally always smashing the attack button mindlessly to clear these swarms - adding to the frustration of exploring.

On top of this, there are 2 bosses that are just so much tougher than anything else in the game. The final boss is where I decided to call it quits.

This is all unfortunate, because the game is so close to being great. I loved the level design and exploration, the upgrades and RPG systems are solid, and the art and atmosphere are great and cozy. But unfortunately, the game is held back by its weakest parts.

Out of my catalog of retro-style games, I pulled up this game to go with something simplistic for a change. You are an anthromorphic panda, who just finishes his training and gets to meet the princess of the realm for the celebration. When the wild creatures get a little too wild, the village gets attacked and robots are appearing, you set upon your quest to find the answers and seek help from other people to rectify the situation in a scale bigger than predicted at first. As much as the story runs on a save-the-world formula cliché, it's entertaining enough when odd characters, side-quests and story progression twist them up to some extent.

Super Panda Adventures' is a metroidvania with RPG elements, allowing you to adjust your stats and equipment to suit your playstyle a bit, while also collecting EXP as items or through kills. The level design are also intuitive and offers some rewarding challenges for explorers, even though I would appreciate some help finding missing collectibles at the end. Regular enemies are easy enough for your progress in story and experience level, the bosses can pitch up the difficulty curve a great deal, which at worst had me focus on completing other stuff then come back again (I played NORMAL difficulty).

Don't expect too much of the graphics since it's largely pixel and MS Paint-style art dominating, putting it within 16-bit category. Fun game worth its money and for all the video game references that you could stumble upon.