Balan Wonderworld Reviews
All the charm in the universe couldn't save Balan Wonderworld's half-baked platforming and ill-advised one-button design from being a complete bore.
Balan Wonderworld feels like a platformer game from 20 years ago, with outdated mechanics, controls and a horrible costume mechanic which locks the player out of many collectibles way too soon.
Review in Spanish | Read full review
While Balan Wonderworld has a few interesting ideas tucked up its costumed sleeves, none of them are executed particularly well, which makes the game feel like a real chore to play. From its dozens of forgettable costumes and frustrating mechanics to its uninspired visuals, it’s hard to recommend adding this one to your PS5 library, especially when there are much better platformers like Astro’s Playroom and Sackboy: A Big Adventure already available.
Balan Wonderworld presents itself as having a world filled to the brim with imagination, ambition, whimsy, emotion and more.
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.
Wonder how a very well known publisher could stomach having it in their library. Wonder what in the world happened with the Switch version. Wonder where your $60 went.
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.
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 perfect for those who want a relatively relaxed game that delights the mind while not being overly tricky, fills up the cuteness meter, and rewards those who seek out every collectable. There are occasional frame rate drops and some potential confusion at the start due to lack of narration or knowledge about musicals. Along with what for some will be an issue with minimal lack of difficulty increase outside of boss battles and post-game content, this means overall enjoyment may be restricted for some players. However, for the ideal target audience the world of Balan is a joy to explore; the various textures of clothing, the world and items make it feel immersive. The whimsical and unique costumes add more than a style change, they are central to the thrill of helping chapter characters regain their happiness for their passion, be it a hobby or a job. The darker elements of the bosses' appearance and the regular enemies balance the predominantly cute style, making Balan Wonderworld a great new title from Square Enix.
With a price point of $60, it's hard to recommend Balan Wonderworld, especially when other platformers (and even collections such as Crash Bandicoot N. Sane Trilogy, which contain multiple games) are a lot cheaper and are much better. The ingredients are all there for a great game, but everything has gone off and rotten. What's been cooked up is a bland, uninspired trip into a world that should have been anything but. Balan Wonderworld feels like bargain bin material that should be avoided at all costs... at any discount.
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 is just plain bad. Apart from its terrible costume system, it does nothing new and just poorly copies things that other 3D platformers have already done better.
Balan Wonderworld is a great idea on paper, and it's perfectly playable from start to finish, but it's held back by some baffling design decisions and boring gameplay. The idea of a protagonist who swaps between costumes to collect Mario-style shines could be great, but the costumes are too simple, the environments are too boring, and the gameplay is too basic. It could possibly be a good game for extremely young players due to its low difficulty and cartoony graphics, but even then, I would recommend one of the many other offerings intended for that demographic instead.
Surreal, enigmatic and often sloppily executed, Balan Wonderworld is a 90s throwback that might be too period correct for some.
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.
Balan Wonderworld is sadly an old-school platformer with all of the 90's worst flaws. Yet colorful, Yuji Naka's first game with Square Enix lacks almost everything, and everyone who likes even a tiny bit the genres should look somewhere else to find some fun.
Review in French | Read full review
A slightly embarrassing attempt to recall the early days of 3D platforming, with a central gimmick that never really captures the imagination and clunky controls and gameplay.
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
I understand that Balan Wonderworld wasn't made with me in mind – clearly it's meant for a far younger demographic. But even from an objective standpoint, I can't figure out why anyone would want to voluntarily sink hours of their life into such an annoying and incoherent game.