Balan Wonderworld Reviews
All in all Balan Wonderworld is an archaic action-platformer with tons of shortcomings in terms of level desing and overall presentation. If you love the genre, you would probably be repulsed by this game, instead of welcoming it with open arms.
Review in Russian | Read full review
Sometimes, Balan Wonderworld evokes a bygone era of platformers very well, but this is all too fleeting a feeling. All the creativity seems to have gone into the characters and music while the actual act of platforming leaves a lot to be desired. It's far from the worst modern platformer, but given the names involved, it's a thoroughly underwhelming one.
Exploring Balan Wonderworld's levels can be fun, but ultimately its single button gameplay and technical issues hold it back.
Balan Wonderworld is an occasionally inspired, often unimaginative platformer lost to time.
The music is as diverse, and I often found myself just sitting back, taking it all in, because the second I picked up the controller, the magic clashed with how stiff the character was. That toppled with awkward controls that often stutter or outright don't work, and Wonderworld fails in the most important part of any platformer - movement.
Balan Wonderworld comes to market as a title designed to make the little ones enjoy. However, the title fails in most of its proposals, with the artistic section and the use of costumes being the only thing that allows the title to maintain composure at some point.
Review in Spanish | Read full review
Balan Wonderworld looks great but feels incomplete. The game lets you journey through six different stories while collecting golden statues and morphing from one outfit to another. There are 80 different outfits in the game, but some of them feel double or not useful at all. Where the game is great to play alone, the multiplayer feels rushed, where player two doesn't get to do all the things player one can. That being said, the game feels like a great way for kids to spend time!
Review in Dutch | Read full review
Yet Naka and Oshima's new toil collapses under the weight of a shoddy, disoriented realization, mostly unable to pay homage to the old days without being unnecessarily cumbersome. What Balan Wonderworld leaves good, to top it off, is an imagery that might be worth taking back in the future, as long as you find him a less crumpled playful suit.
Review in Italian | Read full review
Like I said at the top of this review, your enjoyment of Balan Wonderworld is going to depend on your tolerance for primitive 3D level design. Strip away the unnecessary costumes and their poorly implemented management system - and fire those Balan's Bouts into the sun - and you might have a nice throwback to a more experimental time of platform gaming, one that would be easier to recommend. But sadly, you can't just strip those elements away. They're here, and they're ruining what is otherwise an enjoyable rewind to the golden era of the mascot platformer.
Balan WonderWorld deserved to be far more than average, as the final game is a marked improvement over the demo. It's beautiful a lot of the time, character designs are mostly wonderful, the unique ideas that appear in each level are great fun… however the overall execution is simply lacking something important. The repetitive bouts, rough edges, and the sometimes awful physics make this a much harder title to recommend. It is full of bubbly unique charm, and is mostly heart-warmingly fun, but many will be put off by the slow, restrictive design, despite this being designed around it. Hopefully, the game will get some traction.
If you’re the patient sort, chances are you’ll have a good time with Balan Wonderworld overall. Costume management is clunky, but you’ll deal with it in order to find the secrets hidden within each world, and you won’t be too perturbed by the eagerly respawning enemies and repetitive Balan Bout sequences. For most players though, everything combined will probably prove to be a little too much. Balan Wonderworld is a game that’s capable of bringing out both delight and dismay in its players, though it serves up a little too much of the latter at times to be easily recommended.
In so many ways Balan Wonderworld feels like a weird game that hopes the concept will make up for execution. With extremely little to see, a minimal story to explore, and visuals that honestly do little more than remind me of simpler times, it's hard to suggest what value Balan Wonderworld adds. It certainly isn't engaging, interesting and so many of the elements are painfully basic. Throw in needless costume-changing animations (I don't need a three-second animation every time I swap), extremely small worlds, and minimal… well, everything and it's hard to be optimistic.
Balan Wonderworld features a range of interesting ideas that are plagued by dated mechanics. Even after losing yourself in the absurd universe, you are quickly brought back to reality due to the rigid movement and odd control scheme that oppose expectations of the genre. Although the game has a lot of charm, it does little to stand out amongst the crowd and due to this, it can be rightfully overlooked.
Painfully average in most respects, Balan Wonderworld won't draw much admiration for its contents. Still, it's a competent game that does have its charms, few as they may be.
The finished state of Balan Wonderworld is disappointing to say the least. For all of its style, I was really interested to see how they would expand upon the preview. The aesthetic and characters are there, the music is captivating, the level design made me want to explore and experiment where I could, and the abilities mostly gave me options to do so. However, these things are held down by a lot of contrivances and outright holes in either functionality or context. The final release of Balan Wonderworld felt like a rush job where good ideas, visuals, and sounds were forced to dance among either unfinished or unfun nonsense.
Balan Wonderworld is a passable platformer marred by a string of increasingly baffling design decisions. It has charm by the bucketload and off-the-wall concepts that land well in spite of themselves, but the experience is inconsistent at best and frustrating at worst. There is a good game in here somewhere, and it is great fun at points, but waiting for those points isn't really worth it.
Those looking for the next great platformer will probably not be impressed either by the design, nor by the mechanisms or the difficulty.
Review in Greek | Read full review
What could have been another of Yuji Naka's great successes has finally turned out to be a standard game that doesn't stand out or stand out, inspired in its designs and visual style but without leading the title in the right direction. The best? the soundtrack, the large number of costumes and the imagination that overflows in each section. The worst? the numerous problems it has that wouldn't have been difficult to solve.
Review in Spanish | Read full review
Not so charming all-action show, however still acceptable for young players.
Review in Slovak | Read full review
Balan Wonderworld is not a complete disaster – there are some interesting ideas at certain points in the journey and the soundtrack is often striking. However, the mechanics of the costumes (that are the heart of the game) aren't very good and are very unbalanced. In addition, the design of the levels is strange and Balan's Bout minigame is just horrible.
Review in Portuguese | Read full review
