I wanted a short rompy hack to play. This one caught my interest. Is it good?
Finished in 2h30
In this hack you play as Denise. The town was invaded by monsters and you have to find the culprit. The story barely exist, past the intro you just go from level to level, defeat bosses characters that are humans too with their own names but no backstory developed. Also Reznor. Near the end you have a cutscene that reveal the bad guy, but it's delivered so abruptly. Whatever, this is not a story hack. Let's concentrate on the level design. Being rated medium difficulty on smwcentral, that means it's an easy hack for decently experimented SMW players, which is alright. I don't mind easy hack, but it's a bit harder to impress since some levels come and went.
Only local girl Denise can help.
New playable character, new system. This time it's an health system, you have 10 HP total (that sometimes can be increased to 11HP due to bugs, aka grabbing a +2HP heart when at 9HP) and enemies deals between 1 or 3 HP. It seems to be depending on the enemy, but it's a bit random, no clear way to know which enemies deal more unless after they hurt you. Even then, 10HP is a lot, more hits than in vanilla SMW so it makes the game easier (there's also plenty of hearts that recover HP in the levels). Gameplay is the same, except Cape was changed to Raccon tail of course. There is one change that I HATE, is fireballs can be shot upwards. This is cool, except to shoot upward, you need to either hold up OR hold jump button. That means shooting fireballs straights while jumping is ass because you have to stop holding B before pressing Y. 90% of the time I want to jump and shoot a fireball but the ball goes up and so I get it. Well the game is easy enough that fireballs aren't necessary, still this is frustrating.
Cute squirrels
Graphically it's ok. The new characters graphics (Denise and the bosses) are ok, levels GFX are varied, but there's some instance where it clashes, especially in the enemies graphics. The music choices are great, except the overworld music, there's only one and it sucks. For a submap it would be ok, but why have the whole OW music of the game be that Boo carousel music from SM64. Doesn't fit and gets annoying quickly.
Can't destroy big blocks with the big shells. Meh.
Level design is okay. It's just straight romp, which is what I asked for. There's some parts with item babysitting that wasn't always needed. I don't mind rompy style, but this was just okay here. Nothing original. It gets a bit better near the end. I honestly don't have much to say about it. The generous health system makes rushing through the level not punished enough, so levels were gone so quickly. There's also few levels with secrets exits, except to get switches palaces. And about that, one level had a message box implying that you should have found the key for the secret exit, but you can't: you can only get the key later. That was mean.
Cool effect.
So this is a short quick romp hack. Some little annoyances and lacking potential, but enjoyable.
⭐⭐
Okay
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