Lovely Planet
Developer: QUICKTEQUILA
Price: $6
Platform: PC
A Steam code for Lovely Planet was supplied to us
Lovely Planet is a weird game. It’s a first-person shooter but your bullets explode into little hearts. It’s fast paced and can get brutally hard at times but it offsets that with the absolute loveliest soundtrack ever. What I’m basically saying is that if Katamari Damacy were a shooter it would be Lovely Planet.
So Lovely Planet is a fast paced shooter and by that I mean you have to quickly move through the levels shooting every enemy you see and making it to the flagpole to get a good score on the leaderboards. You die in one hit and so do they so the person with the best aim wins. There’s not much to it other than that and its hundred or so levels; no story, nothing but you and a bunch of duders in your way to the goalpost. I’m still sort of unsure about how I feel with the shooting mechanics in this game though. There’s no crosshair which I like since it keeps the screen totally clear of any sort of UI elements but the shooting itself takes a bit of getting used to. When you shoot while moving the bullets won’t go straight but will instead curve with the direction your going while shooting. This can both help and hinder you since you have to time your shots with the knowledge that they’re not going to go totally straight at where you shot at unless you’re standing still.
Expect to die many times throughout the game to the point where you’ll go through levels almost through muscle memory as you learn the exact timing required to land that jump while spinning just enough to shoot both of those enemies before landing and hitting that damned apple. Restarting a level is thankfully really quick and you can even hit the R key to restart when you know you’ve messed up a run. Your movement is swift so you’ll be speeding through levels that will eventually require lightning fast reflexes to dodge incoming fire while making tricky jumps on disappearing platforms; to add to the difficulty you’ll eventually have to deal with a thick fog that obscures your view, keeping you on your toes. Sometimes you have to turn for a split second to take a shot at an enemy and continue on without looking to see if the shot connected. Thankfully that’s what the explosion of stars that emanate from your gun is for; it’s basically a visual heads up that you killed that enemy. That’s the sort of pace this game wants you to play at and while at first you’re allowed to take your time through a level, eventually the game ramps things up. Halfway through the game you’re introduced to mines that basically force you to keep moving forward as the game decides playtime is over and starts shoving you through each level.
You’re graded on a three point scale of completion, accuracy, and finishing under time; I can definitely see leaderboard junkies spending hours trying to three star each level and work their way up the leaderboards. I’m not one to care about that kind of stuff but even I started to replay certain levels to better my time and make it onto the top 10 list you see whenever you finish a level.
Lovely Planet isn’t without its faults however and the main (and only) issue I have with this game is that certain levels can feel incredibly cheap and there’s a huge difficulty spike once you reach the fourth world. I’m mainly talking about the apple hazard and the enemies with homing bullets. The apples are launched into the air whenever you get to a certain spot and if they touch the ground you lose because reasons. The homing enemies are manageable but there are some levels where they’re infuriatingly annoying. Certain levels place these enemies in some really shitty spots that will have you either restarting dozens of times or straight up skipping it altogether. You’ll get these moments that require super unforgiving precise timing and those apples and homing bullets will almost always be the reason of your restart. Putting a civilian character (who if shot will restart the level) behind enemies in tricky spots also feels like a really cheap and lazy thing to do. Having to restart a particularly tough level because you keep missing an apple or homing bullet due to the iffy shooting can start to bother you. This isn’t a deal breaker mind you, it’s just something I thought worth noting since you’ll get these levels back to back that are the right amount of challenging and then you suddenly get one of these super shitty levels.
The Final Word
Lovely Planet is a really neat game that’s unfortunately peppered with the occasional cheap feeling levels.
– MonsterVine Rating: 3.5 out of 5 – Fair
