Beat in slow motion mode. I started with the ice planet because I wanted to rescue the girl first, but soon found ice blocks that I could not get past. Looking it up the robot from the green planet was needed to break them. Why allow stage selection with impossible choices? I did not notice if any other of the starting stages absolutely required a character other than Bucky. Such poor stage design. I think there were some optional pick ups that required certain characters. The main thing was to collect enough P with each character to max out their special ability. Bucky could shoot straight ahead, straight up, and straight down only when jumping. His charge was a high jump. The robot fired in a down arc, which was good for targets at lower elevation. It also destroyed blocks, and his charge up was flight. I found the jump had better vertical distance while the flight had better horizontal. The girl had straight shots and her charge up summoned a controllable orb for attacking enemies from any angle. It was a little awkward to control, locked her in place and ended prematurely if she took damage, but was by far the best combat ability. It did a lot of damage against bosses but there was not always opportunity to use it. The duck fired a 3 way spread with limited range and his charge up climbed walls. Last was the human who also had a straight shot and his charge up just increased the damage of the shot. Weird that a human existed in this animal people universe, and also weird that a duck was on team mammal. The human was pretty much redundant with the girl, and there was no time that his charge up shot was required to progress. The characters could be swapped with select only while standing still on the ground, and they shared the same life bar. Compared to games like Little Samson and Castlevania 3 this was lame. There was not enough tactical depth for character swapping, but it was still ahead of games with only 1 limited character. The level and boss designs were full of cheap instant deaths. The kind of trial and error gameplay where the only way to succeed was to already know exactly what to do from previous attempts. Combat took the back seat compared to the platforming with the huge life bar giving a lot of leeway. The bosses required some amount of platforming to either avoid instant death or to hit vulnerable spots. Other than the instant death aspect, I enjoyed the boss mechanics. The general stages would have been a lot more fun without so many instant deaths too. After rescuing all of the characters the game became linear on the enemy mother ship. The first stage was breaking out of prison and rescuing the characters again, only fighting them as mini bosses. This stage felt more open with multiple paths and being able to go back down elevators to previous rooms, but I think there was only 1 correct way. There were snake rooms like in Battletoads, plus the overall theme and writing felt very much like that series. I was dreading something like turbo tunnels or clinger winger, but thankfully nothing ridiculous like that happened. The final platforming boss was like Mother Brain, a stationary thing with different parts to destroy and a crazy amount of hazards going on. After that I was sure the escape sequence would be something like turbo tunnels but I was pleasantly surprised that it instead turned into a shoot em up. It was fairly easy and I mostly used the duck for his spread shot. There were 3 shoot em up bosses before the end of the game. A thing attacked to the tunnel with arms was the easiest, with the duck being able to safely hit the arms without risking getting crushed. I killed the head with the human and liked how the more difficult nature of the bullets were from the head losing attachment to the walls to bounce around. Then was a large ship boss with multiple parts to destroy as you were forced to circle around it with very limited space. Each character (other than human and cat who had the same straight shot) had a position that was best for them so I swapped around still mostly using duck. Too late to be useful I discovered Bucky shot straight behind. This came in critical for the final boss, which was very difficult and took a lot of save state scumming. Half of the screen was taken up by the fiery explosion leaving very little space to dodge the boss and his circle pattern bomb. And he took forever to kill, so I kept dying from chip damage that accumulated over the too long battle.

As much as I enjoy games with different characters to swap between on the fly, this game did not implement that as well as it could have. And the gameplay was more frustrating than fun with all the cheap instant deaths. I do recognize that it was fairly well made but I would not want to play through it ever again.

6.8/10