You may say that a game’s primary job is to be challenging, but I will argue that if a game isn’t even a little bit fun, then it’s never going to survive long enough to be challenging. I don’t know if I’m doing a good enough job of describing why I’m being so scathing of this game. The game is almost like a platformer version of a bullet hell game. This actually isn’t too bad when it comes to moving through the levels, but some of the maps get so visually intense with enemies and bullets coming at you that it can be hard to distinguish what is what, and there is no room for mistakenly firing the wrong item. Lastly you have the special weapon button, which fires off whatever you happen to have chosen with the right analogue stick. There will be times when you decide that moving isn’t the wisest course of action, but shooting something is. That makes figuring out what direction you’re pointing difficult if you aren’t moving. You punch left with L1, or right with R1, instead of just assigning a single button to punch in the direction you happen to be facing. Yet, even here, when I give the game praise I must then damn it. I felt more at home using the D-pad, but your results may vary. You can move about the levels with either the left analogue stick or the D-pad. The movement in game is great, responsive and precise. However, when each of those attacks are coming from a round orb that gives you zero sense of what direction you are facing, it can get a little tedious. This is all fine and dandy, I love to have options when it comes to a game. Putty can even do the Mario stomp on some unsuspecting foes and then send their empty shells, I mean helmets, into other enemies to kill them too. It can call in a little flying machine of sorts that can bomb those who are standing in your path… if you happen to have consumed the ammunition before it got there. It can fire rockets at them if you’ve consumed one of the enemies. It can fire little balloons if you’ve collected enough stars on the level. Okay, so bring it on right, lil Putty has loads of options to defeat those who stand in its way. Alright, the overworld map sucks, so what? Well then there are the actual levels themselves.
Nothing screams awkward like having to push left on the stick in order to move right on the map. Not that bad overall, but every so often the flower spins in some direction and makes navigating to the different levels a real pain. That thorn is an off shoot, which has one or maybe two secret levels which you unlock by completing objectives in the basic map. As you move from the bottom of the stem, you come up to a thorn.
Now, when I say bad level design, I mean bad level design. What kind of drugs were involved in the creation of this game? An army of little dudes who are constantly marching around throwing grenades at you or hiding in sandbag bunkers firing mortars at you, all the while yelling “Fire in the hole!” At some point, a developer has to sit there, look at their creation and ask if the maybe things are a bit too absurd, you know? Airstrikes from bees. Cats who walk around with Shotguns and talk like Chicago Gangsters. Enemies like short little armored knights who fire rockets at you. Enemies like wizards that you can seemingly never kill who fire homing bullets at you which never miss.
Enemies like carrots who speak German catch phrases while wearing sunglasses and jumping everywhere. To do this, you must battle your way through bad level design and unforgiving enemies. It’s his job (and his alone, no idea where this talk of a squad is coming from) to rescue a bunch of sentient red goo orbs through 50 or so levels.
The character you play (Putty?) is a little blue orb of sentient goo. The graphics are dutifully colorful, but have the stench of 1990’s computer animation, so if it is a remake they decided to stick to what they knew. If it was released outside of Europe I never saw it. I don’t know, and honestly, I don’t care. There’s a little controversy about whether this is a real franchise returning, or if this is like Matt Hazzard, a made up franchise built to play on the nostalgia of older gamers like myself. Supposedly, this game existed on the Amiga at one point, and it wowed audiences across Europe. Anyway, I do remember what a good 2D game should feel like, and it should most definitely not feel like Putty Squad. I only played that because I was a man desperate to justify the purchase of his PS4. Basically everything I remember about a well put together 2D platformer. The most recent one I played was Rayman Legends, which was fast, smooth and challenging. You know, I’ll be the first to admit it: I haven’t played a whole lot of 2D side scrolling platformers in the past 10 years.
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