Have you ever played a game and had your opponent blatantly cheat?  When they stack the odds against you so unfairly that it’s almost impossible to win?  That’s what playing Lovely Planet on Wii U feels like.  It’s a first-person shooter developed by quicktequila that came out on Steam in 2014.  It was just released this year on the Wii U and with its poppy soundtrack and cute visuals, I was instantly intrigued.  So what makes me feel so betrayed when I play this game?  Find out in my mighty review of… Lovely Planet!

The look and sound of the game is what really shines here.  There’s no story to speak of.  You’re just plopped into a world and told to shoot every red thing you see.  The visuals are polygonal and softly colored, giving a very Katamari feeling to the world.  Enemies are like living emojis, and random crap is floating everywhere.  Solidifying this cutesy environment is the great soundtrack.  Bubbly J-pop playing while you murder everything in sight is fun and adorable.  It really suits the world and makes it more engrossing as time goes on.  Even the sound effects are cute.  I mean, listen to what happens when you fall into a bottomless pit. This game is charming. Hell, that’s the reason I bought it.

The only negatives I have for the game’s style are in its onenote nature.  The enemies lack a lot of variety and the environments do almost the same.  The whole game feels like one long world, instead of 5 distinct ones.  It’s good to build a cohesive world, but when you only have 5 worlds in your game, you should at least try to make each one feel unique and different. Also, just throwing random kanji and crap everywhere just clutters the environment with no rhyme or reason.  If there were a purpose to any of it, it would be fine but as it stands this stuff’s just here to make the game OH SO SUPAH KAWAII, and pointless. The thing is, the presentation isn’t what causes me to have issues with the game...

It’s simple: run, shoot everything, don’t stop.  To finish a level, you have to reach the pole at the end and kill all enemies along the way granting you a star.  You can also get up to two more stars in each level by beating it within a certain time and by getting 100% accuracy.  Your character fires arrows with the ZR button and jumps with A.  You can also lock onto a target with L and continuously jump by holding ZL.  Again, simple.  Your enemies consist of a skinny carrot-shaped thing that just sits around and cubes that fire bullets, with cube that fire homing shots and carrots that restart the level if not killed quick enough coming into play later.  You also have pink blobs that melt you on contact, nodes that kill you if you stay near them too long, blue platforms that disappear soon after you land on them, and eventually snow that freezes you in place for a couple of seconds.  You also fail if you shoot one of the blue guys.

The biggest pain in the ass, however, is the apple.  It’s launched into the air when you get within its range (and sometimes it’s out of sight) and if you don’t shoot it before it hits the ground you have to restart the level.  The problem with this is that because of how it moves, you can’t lock on and shoot it, and without an aiming reticule , hitting it without locking on is impossibly difficult.  You also can’t shoot it until after it launches, meaning that it HAS to be in motion when you hit it.  Your bullets also travel really slow and take strange trajectories when fired, leading to some of the most confusing and frustrating gameplay I’ve ever experienced.  The game was first released on PC and with a mouse, aiming and looking around is much quicker and easier than it is on a console.  From what I understand, they didn’t change the level design to compensate for this lack of control when porting the game to consoles, making it nearly impossible to get the quick aiming down when you need to.  And no, I wasn’t kidding before. You have no aiming reticle allowing you to see where your shot is gonna go.  IN A GAME ABOUT PRECISION SHOOTING!

The beginning of the game was fun, with running around and shooting the targets being rewarding, but near the end of the game, everything begins to tire you out.  You might beat a level, but you’ll feel annoyed and not want to play the one after it.  The apple sucks, but the main reason for this comes from the game’s lack of thought put into its design.  If your levels require memorization more than technique to beat, then it’s more of a lecture than it is a game.  Like how are you supposed to react to bullets coming at you through fog?  How are you supposed to know where to go when you hear a apple launched into the air?  How are you supposed to enjoy a game that puts you into unfair situations, has lackluster controls, and has bad hit detection? Playing Lovely Planet was the fastest transition I’ve seen a game make from being fun and challenging to being unfair and frustrating, which is a shame because it had a lot of potential to be great.

In the end, I’m not mad at Lovely Planet, just disappointed.  It doesn’t live up to the massive potential it has.  Had the developers modified the game to be playable on a console before porting it, the game might have been fun, but as it stands Lovely Planet is one of the only games I’ve played that is genuinely too difficult to be fun.  Playing this game made me think of Dark Souls and how every time you die in that series you feel that it was your lack of skill that killed you instead of the game.  Lovely Planet does the opposite and makes you feel like it’s cheating you at every turn.  That’s why I’m giving Lovely Planet for the Wii U a 4 out of 10.  They were so close, but they really squandered the foundation on which the gameplay was built.