I came across this game from a YouTube guy by the name of NimbleThor. He focuses solely on mobile games and he does a great job. He did an end of the year video and this game was put into his "S Tier" of games. I didn't really catch my eye to much from his video but being in the S Tier I wanted to give it a chance and see what was up. And it's great!

You can play for free on mobile with ads interrupting you along the way, but the option to beat the game for free is there if you want it. Otherwise it's a modest $2. Which I ended up spending and that is an absolute steal! Especially considering the game is $14 on Switch and PC.

The game is set up like a metroidvania. You can explore and you slowly gain new powers that can help you progress through other parts of the huge world. You enter rooms like you do on Celeste that open with what you can accomplish in each room. Which usually consists of killing all the enemies before your combo timer runs out and collecting all the coins in the room. Both things grant you a mombo coin that you eventually use to progress through latter parts of the game.

The difficulty starts out perfect. Moderately difficult and then slowly ramps its way up to fairly challenging. But nothing where it gets crazy......until it does. I was clipping along at a normal pace and slowly making progress as I played for about 45 minutes every morning. I finished all the main areas and was ready to move into the final area. I texted my buddy and told him I'd be ready to play Tales of Luminaria (We are planning to play it together) in just a day or 2.......

-2 weeks later-

I finally finish the game. Yeah, for real. That last place sucks. The difficulty went through the roof and a couple of the rooms had me almost quitting! Even though I knew I was so close to the end I still almost dropped the game. It got ridiculous. Other than that though, the rest of it felt super balanced.

The controls were passable. They weren't anything as quite as intuitive on mobile as, say, Oddmar, but they were still fairly good. I will say that being able to accomplish this game on mobile I am definitely getting used to the controls there and it just isn't that horrible once you get used to it. Definitely takes practice though.

The story was fun. Nothing exceptional but it made me chuckle a couple of times. The devs definitely knew what they were creating and it was fun to see some of the dialogue that they came up with. But gameplay is definitely what makes this game special, not the story.

Music and sound effects were good. Enjoyed them well enough, but there isn't much else to say on the matter. It's always good when it doesn't annoy you and just floats in the background a good service to the game. But nothing that super stood out in an exceptional way either.

This game is really fun and I definitely recommend it to fans of the genre. If you are interested and wanted to buy on switch or PC so you can have a controller, my personal recommendation would be to wait for it to hit $5-$7 range on price. I think that is the sweet spot for this game. Or just hook up a controller to your phone or tablet and get the amazing $2 price!

Sorry. Anyway, this game is a lot of fun other than the crazy difficulty spike at the end of the game. That really put me off for sure, but I can't deny the greatness of the rest of the game.