Balan Wonderworld

From afar, Balan Wonderworld looks amazing and charming, but as soon as you get a little closer, its magic is lost. Balan Wonderworld got stuck in the nostalgia and success that Sonic and Nights into Dreams had during their prime. It does not take risks and its creativity falls short.

Painfully average in most respects, Balan Wonderworld won't draw much admiration for its contents. Still, it's a competent game that does have its charms, few as they may be.

Around the middle of the campaign Balan Wonderworld suddenly gets its act together and becomes almost enjoyable, but the first half is a discouraging display of awful level design and overall ineptitude. [06/2021, p.40]

Balan Wonderworld is a mid-level platform game that looks great, has great music but its potential was largely wasted.

Balan Wonderworld isn’t always an awful platformer, but it is a consistently boring one. It’s full of charming character designs and the occasional hint of a clever idea, but its insistence on being a one-button game with dozens of needlessly overlapping abilities that are thrown aside just as fast as they are introduced rots it to the core. It’s a mess of undercooked concepts and clunky mechanics that slow it to a crawl, and it seems to take inspiration from better games without properly recapturing what actually makes them fun. Its platforming never evolves beyond the most basic possible obstacles it can throw at you, but it's the fundamentally flawed choices behind that mediocrity that take Balan Wonderworld from unamusing to outright bad.

Balan Wonderworld gets no standing ovation for me – not even a clap. In fact, get your tomatoes at the ready for this musical theatre flop because as much as I wanted to like Balan Wonderworld (and believe me, I really wanted to like it) this game gets more than a few boos from me. With basic platforming, the removal of a jump button, and a distinct lack of challenge, there's little to recommend here.

Balan Wonderworld tries to be an homage to nostalgic platformers from the PS2 era, but it forgets to be a good game in the process.

Playing Balan Wonderworld is like looking forward to a virtuous hot shower after a long and hard day of work, only to find that there is only cold water: a big and unfortunate disappointment.

Balan Wonderworld is a $60 game, but I wouldn’t recommend it for even $10. It oscillates between boring and infuriating. The most fun I had with it was when I got costumes that made it feel almost on par with a mediocre Sega Dreamcast platformer in terms of capabilities. The kindest thing I can say about the game is that it does make for an entertaining livestream. I broadcasted my play on Twitch, and my audience seemed to really enjoy watching me suffer. So I guess this is a great one for all those fans of masochism out there. Let’s call it The Room of video games.