It's a game that dearly wants you to have fun, and fast. It's quick, colourful and without pretension. The map-specific gimmicks inject dynamism into matches that, given its relatively reduced hero complexity, might otherwise risk strategic stagnation.
And that's Halfway's fatal flaw: undermining its own potential for tactical reasoning, whether that's via abrupt enemy spawns, unknowable hit-percentages or those frequent instances when the cursor tool-tip stubbornly claims an enemy is out of sight in defiance of what appears to be the case on screen.
There's a lot of room amid this content for people of every skill level, with an additional nightmare mode for players eager for punishment from the off, and a modified campaign purely for co-op.
I want to enjoy it more: the hybridity of the game is daring and to be applauded. There's obvious passion and idiosyncrasy here, which aren't things you can always say about games spat from the cogs of AAA development. But delightful though it looks, and as winsome as its talking mice are, the combination of frictionless overworld and my frustration with its battle system left me feeling enervated. A less than fabulous fable, then, with a not so fairytale ending.
The game ultimately falls between the stools, being neither quite mischievously obscure art game nor ingenious pure puzzler. But what it has is marvel – momentary, perhaps, in comparison to the game's overall length, but rare enough in itself. Surely that fleeting experience alone is worth a look and a listen.
A single-screen platform brawler that's about as good as the genre has ever been—in versus or wave-survival mode.