So The King's Bird started off incredibly strong. Fantastic soundtrack, great atmosphere, super fun controls. You play as a girl who faces a tyrant to be free. I think. The story isn't much. You just kind of do levels until you fight the King and it ends.

That's besides the point. The main focus of this game is obviously gameplay and style. The former, starts off very well but begins the lose it's lustre by the end. The latter it nails consistently. The game is a precision platformer, like Super Meat Boy and Celeste and it shares the penchant for difficulty. It does not, however, share the same variety as either of those. In 30 seconds of trailer for Celeste, I saw probably ten times more mechanics and THINGS than The King's Bird. Literally the only hazard in this game are spikes. It gets old after a while doing nothing but dodging spikes.

What The King's Bird excels at is momentum based platforming. You can boost and you can glide. And using those abilities you can go really really fast. And when it hits, in the first two worlds, Forest Kingdom and the River Kingdom, it is a better Sonic than anything released since the 90s lol (Sonic Mania excluded). Seriously though, the first two worlds were awesome and probably would have kept this at a 4 star rating. But when you get to the Sky Kingdom something happens. It gets hard. Like really really hard. And most of the levels, it's fine. It's just hard, no big deal. But some of the levels, I genuinely could not figure out what to do, even watching other people's completed runs (A great feature btw). The controls, fine before in the previous two world, tend to fall apart in the last bits. When a margin of error was allowed, I could flow from point to point, like a beautiful bird in the sky (see what i did?). When the entire level is spikes, I found that the turning radius when flying was incredibly wide and it made it difficult to control.

Fortunately you don't need to actually beat every single level in the game. You play in a hub world and select your missions that way, and once you finish X amount of missions, you can move on. The hub world aspect is an absolute disaster. If you're going to have a level based game like this, it should be in a menu or linearly placed. You can DIE on the hub world. Fortunately the hub worlds make frequent use of checkpoints, which the main game also does, a point in its favor.

The final level is 90+% spikes. It's genuinely not fun, and requires the precision and patience of a god. It also introduces a new "mechanic" in how you use your two abilities. In the last level. It's just not a great look to introduce a new way to play that late in the game imo. Especially when the level was already punishingly hard. The final (and only) boss is interesting but presents the only major failing in the game's art design. Several of his attacks look almost exactly like you (black and white design with a white tail of light streaming out) and one of his attacks pushes you off the screen so fast you can't see your character and will probably nose dive and die.

Once you beat the game, and I'm not sure if it was just a bug on my end, but you make a choice. It isn't particularly clear what the choice is or what it even means, but there was no sound whatsoever, and a title card just popped up and no credits played, which I assume was supposed to happen.

Overall it's a fun little indie game I got with Humble, but it's marred by a huge difficulty spike (lots of spikes) that you aren't eased into and a lack of variety. Even the gorgeous art and beautiful music get old when the best you get is a palette change.