Panda Hero is an absolute bare-basic 2D platformer that barely functions, lacks even the slightest hint of originality and is ultimately an embarrassment to those who greenlit it.

First, to the Mario likeness. You run to the right, jump on enemies, break ？blocks to collect coins and power ups. The enemies include: the (definitely not a) goomba, the (definitely not a) spiny and the (definitely not a) piranha plant in a pipe. You do have a bamboo stick though, so there’s that.

If you’re going to make a shitty Mario clone, you at least need to get the running and jumping right. Unfortunately, I found my inputs just not functioning correctly far too often. Some of this may come from the fact that there are two concurrent control schemes, both always active. So, both the B button and up on the d-pad jump. There is no option to deactivate one of the control schemes. Other times, jumping just refused to work.

There is a health bar, which you would think makes things a bit more forgiving, but no. There are no invincibility frames. Find yourself between two enemies and you just get knocked back and forth to die immediately. Homing, flying enemies can likewise wipe you out in the blink of an eye. Enemies that one-hit kill you spawn seemingly at random, sometimes right on top of you. This all creates an infuriating, artificial difficulty.

There is no story. Not even a semblance of an attempt.

In Panda Hero, you run through 4 generic-themed worlds, each with 13 levels of around 2 minutes in length, each world ending with a boss. The bosses are an absolute joke and go down in seconds. As for the level design, I can’t help but think these levels may have been (poorly) auto-generated. There is so little care, so little variation or overarching vision: platform and enemy placement does seem completely random as if designed by computer. The best example of this is in 2-3, an exercise in bad enemy placement, wherein the mid-level checkpoint is one small jump from the end of the level with no enemy or obstacle between.

Visually, the sprites are simple cartoon designs lacking character. Some of the power ups may even be ripped straight from phone emojis. There is minimal animation to speak of, while platform and background variation is non-existent. The music initially is a pleasant surprise: a nice little ditty. Until it loops, and loops again and never ends. Every level of every world, the same 30 second loop.

Here’s the cherry on top of the shit cake. 3-4, is unbeatable without cheesing. Here is the first appearance of using breakable blocks for wall jumping. You will glitch through these walls as often as you successfully jump off them. You can get through 3-4 by passing directly through the walls onto moving platforms on the other side, though that is tricky to pull off. The fact that there have been updates and they haven’t updated the game breaking glitch is astounding. Fixing this wouldn’t salvage Panda Hero as a game, but it would at least be playable!

I also just squeezed through world 3 having lost all my lives to the above glitches, lost my final life in 4-1 and was subsequently thrown back to the start of world 3. It was at this point, I threw in the towel. It seems I didn’t miss much as the above wall glitch reappears in 4-4 making the game potentially unbeatable.

The best part about all of this: on release it was listed at $30 on the switch e-store. Today, it’s still listed for $15. This isn’t worth it for free. Panda Hero would be pathetic even for a mobile game. It’s a contemptible, broken piece of junk with zero creativity, zero originality and a criminal price-tag.

As an aside, the developer Markt + Technik’s logo is a rainbow, so to see them channel their inner LJN shouldn’t have been too much of a surprise.

TL;DR - 10/10 GOTY.