Platforms: Nintendo Switch (reviewed), PlayStation Vita
Have you ever bought a game on deep discount (I’m talking for like less than a dime) and still felt like you wasted your money? That’s about where I am with Revenge of the Bird King. There are glimmers of a decent game here, but there are far too many issues with it for it to ever live up to the little potential it may have had.
Revenge of the Bird King is a throwback to classic platformers where you play as a half-man, half-bird named Dwayne who lives on Gunworld and can harvest gunplants or some nonsensical, dumb shit. The writing isn’t good and fails to be as funny as it thinks it is. This would be easy to brush off if the gameplay or fun factor were on point, but yeah, that’s not the case either.
Dwayne has a few moves and tricks in his arsenal. He’s able to jump, slide, grip and climb certain objects, and use a couple of weapons. The first is a giant blade that is mostly used to chop down obstacles that block your path, but does piss all to stop most enemies in your way. A majority of enemies will need to be shot with your gun, but you aren’t just given a gun because that would be too easy. Instead you’ll have to press a button to plant a gunplant and then press a button to harvest a gun off of said plant. Each gun you harvest also has limited ammunition, meaning you’ll be constantly planting and harvesting guns. This quickly became more of a nuisance than a creative addition as more often than not I’d be so invested in platforming, combat, or just generally trying to stay alive that I’d forget I needed to plant a new gun and end up getting destroyed in one way or another.
For the most part, the game controls well, but having the option to map the controls to my preference would have been nice because some of the button layout choices felt unintuitive and took some getting used to. Where the game really starts going off the rails are the choices that turn it from a tough platformer into a brutally difficult one.
The biggest issue here is that there are no checkpoints, making learning each level (which aren’t short) more of a test of patience (and keeping your sanity) than a rewarding accomplishment. Instant death from falling into pits or spikes make playing this game absolutely unbearable at times. You can be trucking along, feeling great about your run, when a simple missed jump or running into an enemy (knocking you back about the length of a football field with no control over your character) will send you to an instant death and force you back to the beginning of the level.
What’s even worse are the “puzzles” that are deep within a level that force you to time a jump just right and grab onto a moving target over a bottomless pit. There are just too many variables at work here that getting the jump just right may take a dozen or more attempts. Having to replay the entirety of a level up to that point just to practice is infuriating.
There are a few ways to make this issue less frustrating, but they all require a great deal of grinding. Revenge of the Bird King has some light RPG elements thrown in like a level up system and even an overworld map that lets you play levels in the order of your choice. There are also some random levels that you can trigger (pretty much like random enemy encounters in a traditional RPG), which you’ll need to do if you want to grind for coins and level ups. As you level up you’ll be able to increase health, damage, and more. The problem here is that you’ll have to complete any level you play to reap any rewards you’ve earned within it. That isn’t guaranteed to be quick as the length and difficulty of each random level varies wildly.
If you are able to gather enough coins from finishing levels, you’ll be able to buy a variety of items from a shop. The most important of these will be the revival eagle that is used much like a checkpoint would be, but of course it comes with a caveat. It’s not a permanent checkpoint, as once you use one, the next time you die, you’ll need to use another if you don’t want to lose your progress. So if you’re practicing one of the “puzzle” jumps I mentioned above, use a revive, and then bite it immediately on your next try, better luck next time unless you have multiple revives on hand.
It’s an odd choice that seems more like a way to pad the length of the game and make it needlessly frustrating for the player. The worst part of all of this is that the actual gameplay isn’t even that fun to begin with. It’s the type of generic platformer we see all the time with very little to set itself apart (at least in good ways), so that makes the grind that much worse.
Revenge of the Bird King could have been an okay retro style platformer, but what it ended up being was an unfun and frustrating experience. The simple inclusion of checkpoints in levels would have gone a long way in boosting its fun factor. If you’re into needless difficulty just for the sake of difficulty or enjoy grinding levels over and over just to get one step further each time, then you might find some enjoyment here. I wouldn’t say that I outright hate it, but I’m certainly not a fan. If you value your time more than unrewarding, cliché platforming, I’d steer clear of this one.
