Rooster Tale (2D Platformer)

Story

You are a rooster living peacefully on a farm, when, all of a sudden a sly fox steals all the chickens and hides them at various locations. The brave rooster set out on the quest to rescue all the chickens and bring them back safely. Somehow the rooster can shoot fire out of his beak which he used to defeat enemies and beat the sly fox. – None of this is in the game actually, I read this on the Steam store page (not a quoted story).

Gameplay

Pretty much a standard 2d platformer experience. You get your jump, double jump and you can grab a plant to be able to shoot fire (sounds familiar? Yeah, it’s the exact same as Mario). You can also carry certain objects to activate press switches. There are also timed puzzles, throwables, disappearing platforms, and enemies that walk, jump, fly...

What I would like to mention is the new additions. Your double jump behaves differently if you use it with a directional input or not. Directionless is higher while the other one covers more horizontal distance. When standing on certain objects, you can roll them by moving to the edge. This is useful with boxes needed for platforming, but extremely annoying when trying to grab a certain collectible.

As you progress, you unlock more and more new abilities and puzzle elements. These range from spiky enemies that you can’t jump on, to rotating platforms you set up with buttons, and even water physicks (cause who doesn’t love water levels).

Audio and Video

The game has that retro look to it, which is a great option for platformers. Animations are solid, you can tell which blocks are usable simply by looking at them. The custom hats you can equip will fit well with the rooster. Some clouds are hard to observe but that’s just the nature of clouds so it might be intentional.

The audio is decent, everything has a sound to it, which might get annoying over time. The game lacks song variety so you might be better off playing without sound or blasting your own music.

Positives and Negatives

There are good and bad aspects to this game. I believe the bad outweighs the good but that’s just my personal opinion.

The Good

Good aesthetics
Retro aesthetics
Collectibles
Achievements
No major bugs

The Bad

Poorly Optimized
Tedious and annoying
Levels are way too long for a precision platformer
No story is being told in-game
3 hits per life

It starts as a good and fun game, but as you progress it completely misses the mark on what makes a platformer fun and what makes precision platformers good.

Summary

Fun for a few levels then becomes a nightmare with new unfun mechanics, levels that are way too long, and abilities that get used for a level or 2 and forgotten. Collectibles and fashion are not good enough to redeem it, sadly.

Not recommended until some major changes are done.

Rating: 4/10