Super Lucky’s Tale Review

Super Lucky’s Tale

Release: January 1, 1970
Publisher:
Developer:
Genre: Action, Adventure, Family, Platformer, XBox One Reviews
PEGI:
Comments:

 

Comment

The best part about reviewing a game later than other outlets is too see what the chatter is around a specific title, and being able to feed off of that. In general, the majority of outlets are on the same page when it comes to titles, the things they do well, and the things they do poorly. After spending a significant amount of time with the title on Xbox One X, I jumped online to see what the reaction was within the media circle. I was shocked. I was seeing scores of 5 and 6 out of 10, and was flabbergasted on how that was possible. So, I returned to Super Lucky’s Tale to see if there was something I was missing; there wasn’t.

Super Lucky’s Tale is not a AAA priced title, and for 29.99, you get a lot for what you pay. With 4 worlds to explore, and a number of levels within each world, there is plenty to do and lots to keep you going for a good 8-10 hours. In each level, you will work to obtain 4 leaf clovers by collecting all the letters in Lucky’s name, obtaining 300 coins, completing a mystery objective, and completing the main objective for the level. For the most part, it works well – although I never felt that these clovers were hard to obtain, every once in a while, the developers through a particularly challenging level at you.

The controls themselves are simple enough for a young child to play, but still provide depth to the game play. Lucky has a standard spin attack, can dig under ground to find treasure, and can perform double jumps. It’s all very easy, and unlike other games that bog you down in special moves, this one keeps it plain and simple.

The game does swap between an ‘open world’, explorable environments to 2D side scrolling levels. The change of pace throughout is nice, although it sometimes can be hard to get into a rhythm with a specific control scheme when jumping back and forth. This is truly where the problem does like with Super Lucky’s Tales. Because the game does not feature a full 360 camera in the open world environments, it can take some time to understand how Lucky moves, and depth perception on some jumps definitely becomes and issue. The more you play, the more you understand how to deal with these camera deficiencies. Everytime I had to swap from 3D to 2D, and back to 3D, I always felt like I was re-learning that camera difficulty curve, that ultimately should never have existed in the first place.

There is so much charm here though, and with the game looking fantastic in 4K HDR, it’s hard to not enjoy the world and the characters themselves. While everything is definitely bright and vibrant, there are parts of each world that are unfortunately pretty bland. While this doesn’t affect the game play per se, it would have been nice to see a bit more detail throughout. Again, this is partially because of a lower budget; cuts need to be made when releasing a title of this caliber, and frankly, those extra details are the first to go.

But what you are left with is still a fantastic little title for half the cost of a full retail release. IN fact, I’d argue you definitely get more value for what you pay, which cannot be said for all AAA, 59.99 titles currently available. The story is charming and fun, preaching heroics and can-do attitudes; it’s great for adults and kids alike, with witty humour worked into the commentary often. On a console dominated by mature titles, Microsoft has done a great job of pushing games like this as well, to truly show why Xbox One X is the ultimate family, entertainment system.