Everything is of an immaculate standard, from its hand-drawn animated characters to its deliberately blurry and scratched film look, to its fantastic original jazz and big band soundtrack: it’s not an exaggeration to say this game is a piece of art. Designed in the style of 1930s Fleischer and Disney animations (think Betty Boop and Steamboat Willie) and nailing that style with laser precision, it’s easily one of the most visually jaw-dropping 2D platformers you’ll ever play. It’s this charm where Cuphead’s real strength lies. By all means, consider it a way to ease into Cuphead’s parry and weapon-changing mechanics, but you’re going to want to switch to Regular difficulty as soon as possible to make sure you don’t miss out on a lot of the game’s charm. While there is a ‘Simple’ mode, which greatly reduces each boss’s health and generally makes things more manageable for beginners, it’s not an ideal solution: it removes a lot of boss attack types – even entire phases at times – and doesn’t give you a soul contract when you beat them, meaning you can’t reach the final stages and beat the game. This means you can’t stand there thinking, “Right, he’s going to do this attack, then he follows up with that attack, then I can get him”, as if you were learning a sequence of fight choreography: instead, you have to wait to see which of their attacks they’ll use next and react quickly (and often you won’t have a lot of time to do this).Īt the risk of sounding like an insufferable “git gud” macho man, practice really does make perfect with this one: this is a game where you’re expected to take on these boss fights over and over again and slowly learn every attack permutation as you edge ever closer to completely defeating them. Most players’ frustration will likely lie with the bosses’ random nature although they tend to have three unique phases, each with their own sets of attacks, these attacks are generally chosen at random throughout each phase. The boss fights may be a little longer than those in other action platformers, but the same general principle applies: learn each boss’s attack patterns, figure out how to avoid each type of attack, discover its weak spots and let it have it until it eventually keels over. The reality is that, yes, it can be tricky at times, but it’s not like it hits you with an endless onslaught of abuse: it’s more about pattern recognition. In case you’ve missed out on its notoriety on other systems, Cuphead is known for being an exceptionally difficult game. All Speech Subtitled (Or No Speech In Game).The former are much fewer in number (there are only six in total) and are straightforward enough affairs – get to the end of the stage with at least some health intact – but it’s the 19 boss encounters which are the real meat of this game, and the ones that will test your abilities to their limits. Yes, it’s fair to say that Nintendo and Microsoft are best buds just now, and Switch owners are starting to get the benefits of that.Ĭuphead mainly consists of two types of level: run-and-gun stages and boss battles. Not only that, but in a future update the game is going to receive Xbox Live integration, including the ability to unlock Xbox achievements. Now, though, we’re being treated to the most impressive sign of their partnership yet: a Switch port of Cuphead, one of the most critically acclaimed games on the Xbox One and a title that was an Xbox console exclusive (until now, obviously). The recent love-in we’ve been seeing between Nintendo and Microsoft started a while back when Minecraft was released on Nintendo systems, and grew stronger when the two paired up to passive-aggressively taunt Sony’s refusal to embrace cross-platform multiplayer. Console wars are all well and good, but when great games are made available on multiple systems, the ultimate winner is the player. It’s a well-known fact that teamwork makes a dream work.
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