Not a good idea to play a hard romhack just before playing Mario Wonder but hey.
Playtime and number of deaths are visible ingame. Very cool. It took me around 14 hours to 100%
Here a romhack I really wanted to play. Why? Because it's made by fellow frenchmen. In fact it is a collaboration hacks of three people. Or more like compilation hack it feels like sometimes.
Underwater bush?
In term of aesthetic and stuffs. The game has custom graphics (nice overworld) but most levels are quite vanilla. There doesn't seems to be any rules for the graphics, anything goes. But overall the levels looks good. You play as Mario, no change in gameplay. There's no story, the bad guy this time is Poubel (get it? "poubelle" means trash) but it doesn't matter. Then the level design, is mostly good Mario platformer, but it varies between levels. Let me explain it:
I like Yoshi's Island graphics in SMW romhacks, it's so cheesy.
It seems a compilation of various level, with some levels being good and some... not as much. Not due to the authors, just some designs choice that are sometimes dubious. Also the game can become quite hard. For the better or worse. Let me explain: each level has a difficulty rating. World 4 (which can be your second world if you want) has the first two 5 stars levels (very hard). You can avoid them if you want, but I played them of course. These levels are radically different in their approach of difficulty. One is classic SMW challenge, with tricky enemy placement but with powerups and enough rooms to get around them and it's a ton of fun. The sort of classic challenging difficulty that I love. Then the one before start in a normal level in the forest with a strange gimmick of invisible bullets, then after a few screens you get in a sublevel and this gimmick is immediately forgotten, you are now in a ghost house "maze" (lot of paths with no way of knowing beforehand which one is useless or not so just guess right lol) and a powerup filter at the start of that section (which remove the powerup you got at the start of the level). Powerup filter at the start of a level okay, but in the middle, why? That sucks. Especially since that maze still has tricky enemies to avoid. Also some random platforming sections there and there each themed differently, and a midpoint very far. This level is a mess, it's like multiples levels crammed together without though, and that's unfortunate. Too bad, because most levels in the game are alright, and like I said some are very fun and challenging, but you have these weird levels there and there that feels like weren't tested properly, or that sometimes are okay but just too long without enough checkpoints and/or powerups filter inbetween. Also with capes and Yoshi (which aren't filtered properly, as some filter blocks don't remove reserve item) can break some levels. Which is good, it's fun to break levels. I did bring cape from previous levels (best spot to farm cape I found is 2-1) to use in a few levels, but overall tried to do the levels legit, and you should try to, they're fun.
I didn't cheat, I somehow managed to clip into the wall while mounting Yoshi lel.
So what's more to say? The level has various level, some with gimmicks to break the pace but overall they are vanilla-like platforming challenges. In general, the hack is fun, there's just a few levels that really aren't as fun as the rest, which is unfortunate. The very last levels which is [SPOILER] three levels stuck together who should have been three separate levels, of varying quality where imo the castle section is the best and only one I attempted "legit" because despite the hard difficulty the setups are better and it has powerups and that makes all the differences, it's extremely fun, while I hate that last section with the fast boos with no powerups and no safe spots and PAUSE BUTTON NOT WORKING [/SPOILER] resume well that feeling.
Take your time and find the right timing.
Rating:
⭐⭐⭐
Good
Just pick another bowser castle room next time lol.
