New Super Lucky’s Tale Review

Super Lucky’s Tale has been out for a few years on PC, but makes its way as a port for home consoles. Super Lucky’s Tale is a part of a group of indie games that look to bring back the 3D platformer genre to a new generation after a major lapse in the genre. As far as a platformer, New Super Lucky’s Tale knows how to take the right gameplay elements from others, but without a new presentation.

New Super Lucky’s Tale follows the titular fox on his adventures to escape a magic book world while foiling the plots of the evil Kitty Litter gang. There really isn’t any surprise past that, each of the 5 world’s stories plays out the exact same. Lucky meets the world’s goofy evil kitty, the kitty challenges him, Lucky collects clovers — this game’s collectible “Stars” from Super Mario, Lucky fights the boss, and then goes on to the next world by jumping into a huge magic book. There really isn’t much of a plot to speak of, in a way it’s episodic where each episode doesn’t have any effect on the other but follows the exact formula each week. It’s fine if you just want to be distracted for a while and laugh at the goofy Kitty Litter characters, which are arguably the best characters of the game.

New Super Lucky’s Tale, right off the move of the analog stick, plays slow, which is a double-edged sword for a platformer. It’s not the nightmare of the constant glassy terrain of an older Sonic 3D platformer, but it feels like you are constantly stuck in 1st gear going downhill when compared to classic platformers such as Crash and most Super Mario platformers. It creates more accurate jumps, but a run button should have been necessary because simply the default movement gets monotonous.

Overall, New Super Lucky’s Tale’s worlds and environments look cluttered. Compared to other platformers like A Hat in Time and Yookoo Laylee, this is the most cluttered and small looking of the new age of 3D platformers. The levels themselves are usually small in platform space and scale, but have a massive amount of assets taking up space. From bushes, to whole families of bunnies, to unclimbable objects, to placeholder NPCs, and atmosphere pieces, each world doesn’t always feel “Alive” as it comes off the aesthetic is cluttered. However, the colours are vibrant, especially when New Super Lucky’s Tale wants to show off. Compared to the colour quality, the graphics aren’t up to the maximum of modern consoles. New Super Lucky’s Tale looks like an HD Remaster of a GameCube game.

As a platformer, New Super Lucky’s Tale is clean, not a glitch around every corner, not endless aggravation. Compared to the other 3D platform competitors New Super Lucky’s Tale has, it’s the cleanest of the bunch, but also it has less character and challenge. If you’re a veteran of 3D platformers, this wouldn’t be your cup of tea because everything it does, it has taken and cleaned up from another well known 3D platform to the point where the next challenge is easily predictable and the puzzles are completed with ease because it’s just so familiar. New Super Lucky’s Tale does nothing new with those elements, but provides those gameplay elements with a cleaner experience than a lot of the originals.

You may find yourself not coming back to New Super Lucky’s Tale after you finish it the first time. For you to complete the game it pretty much requires you to get every single possible clover, not a hard task but more about searching and time use. What makes this worse is it won’t save any new clover you find unless you complete a level first which numbs the senses to each level that was created for New Super Lucky’s Tale after you have done a certain level 3 times over. Having to locate, just about, every single collectible to progress to a new world isn’t something you’d find in many platformers as most often make it, so there are optional collectibles with rewards for the player to find them. By the time you finish New Super Lucky’s Tale, you might find yourself feeling tired of the game from traversing the same thing over-and-over again. Basically, having a 100% walkthrough at hand is a must for a lot of the game, unless you like exploration.

New Super Lucky’s Tale’s tone is light and easily matched for a younger audience. The difficulty and aggravation are low when playing New Super Lucky’s Tale, but not creatively hard enough to please platformer veterans. New Super Lucky’s Tale is quirky in its own way with its characters, but the formula of the story can easily be pointed out, but younger audiences will probably have a lot of fun with them. Overall, New Super Lucky’s Tale is a cleanly put together experience but lacking the charisma and creativity of classic platformers that made for lifelong fans of the genre that would make it more than just an okay game.

REVIEW CODE: A complimentary Microsoft Xbox One code was provided to Bonus Stage for this review. Please send all review code enquiries to press@4gn.co.uk.