Super Lucky’s Tale is not a bad game. It’s not a great game, but it’s not bad. It’s okay. It doesn’t get any better the further you go, nor does it get any worse. It just persists in being average, and while that’s not inherently a terrible thing, it does make for a slog in the later stages.
Lucky’s biggest sin is the combination of a somewhat floaty jump and the limited camera angles. As is the case a lot of times in 3D platformers, finding your place in the three-dimensional space can be tricky, especially when some coins, enemies, fireballs, etc. may not have a shadow of their own, or when the fixed camera angle is too low for you to really see where you are on the z-axis. You will die a lot in Super Lucky’s Tale, but not because it’s a difficult game. Most of the challenge and resulting death will be from either user error or experimentation, because even when you know where are you are, sometimes it’s also hard to distinguish the platforms from actual decoration. A few times, I jumped to an object only to hit an invisible wall and fall to my death.
As far as aesthetics are concerned, the game is cute and charming and completely inoffensive. It’s targeted at a younger audience, so the difficulty level is relatively low, but at the same time the developers made some weird design choices at certain points in the game. Getting three clovers in a stage, then losing your last life to a stupid mistake and having to get those three clovers all over again isn’t a penalty you normally see in a game targeted to this audience, as well as boss battles that sometimes get a bit more challenging than they should be due to having to constantly determine where you are in the 3D space. Too many times I jumped to pounce on something, only to realize I was way off and either hit the object dead on or missed it completely. This is no more evident than in the final boss battle, where the giant kitty cat sorcerer is rotating your platform as fireballs shoot at you. Not having a point of reference for the fireballs (which also seem to rotate as well) made for a weird and off-putting situation. If I had been one prone to motion sickness, I probably would’ve had to take a pause or two.
Other weird decisions were clovers that were way too obscure, with a solution that I literally would not have ever attempted had I not looked it up on Youtube. Again, keep in mind this game is targeted for a younger audience, so maybe there’s a box I’m not thinking outside of, but I’ve been doing this for a few decades so I like to think I’m fairly in tune with video game logic. This only happened a few times throughout the course of the game, but it did happen, and I always felt kinda shitty having to cheat on what is essentially a kid’s game.
I would’ve liked Lucky’s skill set to have changed a little. The game offered new platforming challenges and tweaks on the gameplay in later levels, but Lucky himself still had the core set of moves from beginning to end. Perhaps this was intentional to keep the game digestible by a younger audience, but I was a kid once too, and I think the addition of a dash button would’ve been easy to handle.
In all this a chunky game that took me quite a while to finish. This is mainly because I was making it a point to get all of my clovers in one stage before moving on to the next, and because I can only handle one or two stages at a time before having to play something else.
Okay, that’s enough talk on Lucky. He took me too damn long to finish and I’m not gonna let him take up all of my typing time too.
