• Is this THE most slept-on game on the GBA??? I don’t remember anyone talking about it in its’ time but WOW is it awesome
• I cannot recall another action game besides maybe NES Ninja Gaiden which is this satisfying to control
• Rough summary of what’s going on: You are Astro Boy, and you are trying to save the world from…. something? (The plot makes no sense anyway if you’re not familiar with the manga, which I am not). In order to save the world, you must fight your way through stages which are sometimes beat-em-up style and sometimes shooter style. Many stages contain bosses at the end. There are unlimited lives and unlimited continues. Absolutely nothing in the game is missable. Since you’re a robot who is trying to develop a soul, you power up when you meet people, talk to them, solve their problems, etc.
• Sometimes feels like it’s only a boss rush style game, which is a good thing, because that is when combat is at its’ best
• Makes you do 2 loops in order to fully beat it, and this is one of the few instances where I had absolutely no problem at all with that. It’s not easy, but it’s so, so much fun that you can’t help yourself. When the first loop is done you don’t want to stop playing anyway.
• Very creative bit of game design / plot device: Loop 1 is entirely linear, and only after beating it, a “stage select” screen opens up. Without spoiling anything, there are plot reasons that you can now go to any stage you want. This matters a lot with regard to progression, because in Loop 2, you have to do things out of order, search for specific people to talk to, replay stages in different ways, etc. You would think it would be stale but it absolutely isn’t.
• Music was kinda hit or miss but maybe I’d like it if I had seen the show? Doesn’t really matter anyway because the game is so fast paced, and each individual level is so short, that nothing overstays its’ welcome
• Unfortunately, the good people at Treasure may have swung for the fences a little too hard when it comes to graphics. There are quite a few slowdowns, especially with lots of enemies on the screen, but IWABH I had stockholmed myself so hard that I started to welcome it, because it at least gives you a little more time to think when tons of stuff is flying at you at once.
• Not just one of the best games on the GBA! It is one of the finest action games ever made. Highly, highly recommended.

• At 10 years old, this has got to be the newest game I’ll ever post about on here. I really did not know what I was getting into with this at all, just happened to find a good sale on it
• When I started Tropical Freeze, I didn’t even know it was a sequel to “Donkey Kong Country Returns.” Call me a Donkey Kong Kasual I guess.
• On this play through, I didn’t sperg out about getting all the extra levels, but did manage to find a few. Honestly, the secret levels are kinda the best thing about this game. Especially the -K ones, those are tons of fun
• As a boomer, the controls and “feel” of this game do not resemble Donkey Kong Country to me in any way. Tropical Freeze kinda falls victim to some of the exact stuff that Cranky Kong himself was complaining about 30+ years ago. There are so many animations for every little thing, that it makes character movement feel really slow. But not in that intentional way like Castlevania where levels are designed around this.
• Here’s a specific example of the above point: There will be many, many occasions where you’re standing on the edge of a platform and you need to jump over to a platform where there’s an enemy. You know you can’t get enough height to hit them in the head, so you have to wait for them to move away from you, THEN jump on the platform, THEN jump on their heads. However, this is all timed in such a way that when you arrive at this platform, there is not anything you can do besides sit and wait for the enemy to slowly walk to the other side. It feels like a huge disruption to break momentum for no reason like that. This is especially unwelcome considering how long a lot of the levels are.
• This happens so often that I started to think maybe I’m missing something. I went and watched some videos of how real pros play this game, and every single time, they got caught where I did, with nothing to do while you wait for an enemy to move away from where you need to jump. This wouldn’t be so bad if it looked like a rare oversight that the QA team just so happened to miss, but it happens CONSTANTLY, which makes me think that for some reason it is intentional.
• Like the levels, the boss fights also drag on FOREVER. Remember in DKC2 how the final battle with K.Rool feels? Like he has infinite different patterns and every time you die how much it SUCKS to get all the way back to where you were to try and memorize the next one? That is how every boss in this game feels.
• A small ray of sunshine though: brother David Wise did do the soundtrack to this, so while you may be annoyed at big swaths of it, you at least get to listen to some incredible music during.
• Overall impression: I like the really hard levels and probably will come back to them, but outside of that, some of the only times I wasn’t bored was when I was annoyed.

Full Disclosure: Frens, I am sad to report that for (I think?) the 2nd time in the history of this site, I have used save states to complete this game. For that reason, I think everyone should read this review as even less legitimate than usual! No one should listen to reviewers who haven’t shown the ending screen without save states. The main issue I ran into was that I would save (the real way, with a memory card), go try to do something, die horribly in the process, and getting kicked out to the title screen and reloading the save from the memory card took so much time, I stopped feeling like I was doing anything or learning anything. Obviously, skill issue, etc etc. But I am nothing if not an honest reviewer! That being said, here are some stray thoughts:

• This is the game that has made me really understand why CD audio is so important, and how good sound design can be. Even if I had played this on a regular TV back in the day (I didn’t), I wouldn’t have picked up on that. But playing it with some really nice headphones (or, I assume, with a real surround sound system) makes for so much more immersion, and makes it work even better as a horror game
• Believe it or not, I actually did go into this totally blind, except for the past 30 years or so of memes. I didn’t know what to expect at all.
• Tank controls are the thing most people complain about, but that part didn’t bother me very much. After maybe 1-2 hours of gameplay, it became second nature. I also now totally get why directions need to be fixed instead of relative. Tank controls help a lot when the fixed camera keeps jumping around.
• Maybe I didn’t do as much exploring as I should have or, again, maybe skill issue, but for the entire first part of the game (basically everything up until you go out to the Garden) I didn’t feel like I had enough ammo at all. It was fine after that, but the first couple hours of this game are kinda a slog
• Also never learned how to use the knife properly, other than to stab enemies while they’re down
• A lot of this kind of stuff is papered over by the lovable characters and amazing setting. You can tell the people who made Sweet Home worked on this but I have ranted and raved about that game enough
• The combat is pretty messy, but the puzzle solving makes up for it. It’s hard to see this while you’re playing, because you never know what manner of horrible scary creature is right around the corner, but really there isn’t that much combat anyway.
• That being said, I will note for posterity that the version I played was the very first one on the PlayStation. None of the later editions, not the one with DualShock support etc.
• Overall, I enjoyed this game for what it is, but I’m still left feeling like I wasn’t quite fair to it. Like I missed something and it deserves a better treatment. I’m glad I played it due to its historical importance, but I need to revisit it again somehow (or, maybe play the HD remake?)