Originally posted July 24th 2015 on the Seafoam Gaming forums

Title: Tiny Galaxy

System: Wii U (eShop)

Price: $5.99

Release date: 7/16/2015

The main game/story

In this gravity-based platformer, you take control of Orion, who sets out on a quest to regain his headphones. …That’s pretty much it in regards to story for this game.

Graphics

Very simple 2D graphics with not much to them, along with some backgrounds that tend to clash with the characters on screen from time to time. There’s an intro cutscene which does have some very nice artwork, but it makes me wish the whole game looked that nice.

Music and Sound:

Simple melodies with not much to them, depending on the world you’re in, along with sound effects that work as they should. Nothing much here at all, though whenever you die and respawn the audio stutters a bit, which can get incredibly irritating after multiple deaths in a row.

Gameplay

The game is platformer with a simple goal: Collect three stars in every level to open up a gate to the next level, and get enough stars to complete the game to get your headphones back. You move with the left analog stick on the gamepad and jump with the A button, and that’s all you do in terms of control. Unfortunately, several issues prevent the game from becoming a fun experience for all. One of the more minor things is that there’s no D-Pad support at all, which in a 2D game like this isn’t the best idea considering how the D-Pad would allow for precise movement in a game like this, mainly due to all the obstacles you have to face.

Speaking of obstacles, this game is filled with a lot of them in each stage. One hit from any of them and you die instantly and get sent back to the beginning of the stage. Unfortunately, nearly every stage in the entire game is difficult, which may turn off some players just for that reason alone. However, being a difficult game isn’t a bad thing if it’s a fair and progressing challenge along the way. (Like Ping 1.5 or 1001 Spikes for example) There’s barely any balance in this game’s difficulty, with some earlier levels in world one being much harder than the later levels or even the boss battle of the same world. Instead of a gradual increase, with the challenge being fair the entire way along with being fun enough to keep the player interested, it’s all over the place, with some levels only requiring a few tries while others require way too many due to poor placement of enemies or the questionable hit detection for a few of the obstacles. When you also take into account the fact that it’s REQUIRED for you to complete every level in a world to check out the next one, along with the lack of any sort of indication that you already completed a level, it comes off as artificial difficulty to prolong the game, instead of any fair challenge that increases as the game progresses.

It’s completely unbalanced which leads to the game becoming a frustrating and cheap mess at times while it’s a wonderful experience at other times. Most of this difficulty also tends to come from the planet switching mechanic. If there’s a planet right above you, you can jump and get to that planet with some minor gravity switching involved, which doesn’t sound so bad until you take into account that the same button to jump is also the same button to go to a nearby planet, meaning that in some cases you may be trying to avoid an obstacle on one planet only to accidentally get into the range of another, causing you to get sent to the other planet and die instead of jumping over the obstacle you were planning to. It would have been much easier if there was a separate button for going to the other planet instead of making it the same button.

Conclusion

In conclusion, Tiny Galaxy has some neat ideas going for it, in terms to using gravity to switch to different planets to improve your strategies, along with some of the cool boss battles. Unfortunately due to the numerous design issues, random difficulty and poor level design, it’s incredibly hard to recommend for the current price of $5.99. It’s a challenge through and through, although not really a fair one. I give Tiny Galaxy a 4 out of 10.