I've been looking forward to playing the final version of Cuphead for a really long time. I've been playing it at trade shows and a whole bunch of events. And then I finally got to play it when Microsoft sent in this copy for the Xbox One. Let’s get into it.
Let’s get this out of the way early, the visuals are so absolutely perfect. It looks exactly like a 1930s Fleischer cartoon which is just amazing that they were able to get a game to look exactly like that. If you were to ever ask me what my favorite 2D series was for animations I'd probably say the Metal Slug series on the Neo Geo arcade systems but now with Cuphead well I think this is my favorite. I've never ever in my life seen anything so well produced with such high quality animations and if you didn't know you were playing a video game you would sure as heck think you were watching a cartoon straight from the 1930s. This entire game came from a small team that was willing to take a whole bunch of hand-drawn animations and scan them just to get that exact quality that they were going for. This is really unlike anything else you're gonna play. I could go on and on about how good the visuals are in this game with its use of colors, amazing backgrounds and really good character designs but let's not get ahead of ourselves. The game does look good but how does it play?
The gameplay in Cuphead reminded me a lot of the old Mega Man series and it's actually kind of interesting that it feels like that because it takes a bunch of different concepts from older style video games and merges them into one. First off this game really doesn't feel linear. You're not just starting off on some random level and completing the level to get to the next one, there's an overworld on here and the overworld allows you to walk around and pick what stage you want to play next. But you kind of have to complete enough of the stages in order to get to the next world. I really appreciated this because if there was ever a level I really didn't want to play again and I wanted to take a break from I could just walk away and try a different stage or boss. This is probably going to happen more than once because this game is pretty difficult.
Speaking of difficulty, when you enter a boss battle you can choose between two modes: simple and regular. Don't underestimate the simple mode though it put a seasoned gamer like me to the test. And regular mode battles are not only more intensive but you will see exclusive animations that don't appear when it's set to simple. So if you're playing the game for the gameplay and you want to experience more of those really tasty animations well it's kind of worth it. As you move through the four islands the baseline for difficulty rises so the easiest stage on the second island is significantly harder than the toughest level on the first island. At least that's how it felt to me anyway. The difficulty of this game has been a concern for some but I gotta say for a gamer like myself I didn't find it super crazy hard all the time.
The run-and-gun stages are really fun and feel like classic platforming stages and in some instances they can get annoying but they're just like anything else, you play them a little bit more until you understand the stage and you're able to beat it. There's a couple of boss battles that are a little bit less forgiving than others but they all have a pattern, something that you can identify and memorize which is half the fun of playing this game. That's the way old-school games used to feel, that practice to advance your skill to make yourself a better gamer. In the end I think this game is going for something that really harkens back to a time that we don't have anymore. Unless you're talking about Dark Souls of course. There's a couple of boss battles early on that I beat in one go without having to go back and retry again and that made me feel pretty good about that stuff. But if you're ever gonna play a boss battle again and again you'd probably get bored of seeing the same pattern get repeated over and over. So they change up the order of the attacks so they appear in different ways when you go back to play a boss and that's a good way to go about that. Every boss battle features its own theme song and all the music is 1930s jazz stuff and it sounds amazing. It works really well for the time period that it's being placed in. This entire experience – the visuals, the music, the gameplay – really make you want to go back and play again and again and get a better score every time you try it. Now for me personally the game did feel a little bit repetitive after awhile because some of the gameplay modes do just repeat themselves again and again. That's not to say the entire game plays the same way because there's even shoot-'em-up sequences in the game that are actually really fun and they switch up the controls a little bit and give you different abilities that put a spin on things, making it a little bit less repetitive. But you still repeat those stages every so often but you can switch out features and choose different abilities for your character so you can go back to those old stages and have a little bit of a different experience.
The entire game can be played in co-op as well. The levels don't change but you have a friend along for the ride which makes it a little bit more fun. But I actually found the co-op mode to be more difficult because I found the second player in the game to be a little bit distracting. This game is very colorful and bright but your characters look very similar so when you're playing together you might just get lost in the mix. But I think the one thing I really don't like about this game is the parry feature, where you jump in the air and press jump again to spin attack off an object. Now this is just a personal opinion for me but the parry feature is just something that didn't seem to work with me quite a bit. There were some instances where the parry feature worked really well but I could never really get the parry feature to work all the time. Throughout the game while you're running around and shooting things you'll be advancing your special meter, the higher meter is the more attacks you have to use and when your meter is full you'll get one big attack which is a special and it's pretty fun to utilize. If you want that special meter to grow even faster though all you have to do is find these bright pink objects through every level and if you parry close to them you'll gain a certain percentage of your special meter faster giving you an advantage while you're playing every level. There are a bunch of in-game power-ups you can purchase at stores in the game and these stores utilize coins that are found at the run-and-gun stages which unfortunately is the only time you ever find the coins. Unless there's some characters randomly in the overworld that are giving them away for free which doesn't happen enough in my opinion. But regardless though you're gonna be able to play a lot of the gameplay modes again and again with these new power-ups and one of them triggers the parry move automatically and I really like that one. But I would have preferred if the parry move worked well naturally because it just seemed to be a lot more fun to play that way.
Another thing I wasn't a crazy big fan of was the controller layout when I was playing this game but the entire game gives you complete control over changing the way that the layout is. So if you have some kind of issue the way I did you can change it instantly. But if the developers are reading this and I don't know if they are I have one suggestion for you guys that could make the controls even better. The basic control scheme utilizes the left joystick or the d-pad to move around which works really, really well. But if you want to aim around anywhere on the screen you have to hold a specific button down to allow you to choose where you’re aiming but once you've engaged that button it holds the character still and that kind of sucks. So here's an idea, remap some of the face buttons to the top triggers and shoulder buttons and then free up that right thumb so that you can use it on the right joystick. Now you can use that joystick to aim and fire at the same time in any direction and that means when somebody's running forward they can aim backwards and fire with just the movement of a joystick. It would work quite well at making the game just a little bit easier to play from a controller perspective and make it a lot more fun for people. But regardless even if that doesn't happen this game is still very fun to play and works with the control scheme that they had in mind.
This is an incredible experience and it's one you simply shouldn't pass up. It's worth it on any system you want to play it on as far as I can tell because it's just that good of a game. But if you're gonna be playing it on the PC you're probably gonna want to get yourself a controller because this doesn't feel like a keyboard game.
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