Cuphead Pt3. : Conquering Queen Cupcake, Bozo the Clown, and Meanie Genie! (Steam PC Gameplay)
Channel: LIFE RPG
Date: 2017-10-21

Cuphead is a long shot from being a walk in the park, but despite what a few salty game journos have to say it is completely fair. Enemies telegraph attacks long before they happen, and learning is a part of any gaming experience. You will die, but you will correct things and eventually overcome that particularly difficult boss.

Cuphead already made quite a splash even before releasing due to Dean Takahashi of VentureBeat spending 26 minutes without completing the first level. Gamers put on their rage face and were quick to pounce, which has made certain people cry about GamerGate all over again. None of this is Cuphead's fault though.

The drama surrounding Cuphead propels a relatively stylistic, boss-centric, and skill-based platformer toward becoming the stuff of legends. I really enjoyed my time with Cuphead and will likely find myself playing much more because I enjoy the feeling of accomplishment that comes with beating a game this difficult.

Cuphead is available on Steam: http://store.steampowered.com/app/268910/Cuphead/

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Cuphead is a classic run and gun action game heavily focused on boss battles. Inspired by cartoons of the 1930s, the visuals and audio are painstakingly created with the same techniques of the era, i.e. traditional hand drawn cel animation, watercolor backgrounds, and original jazz recordings.

Play as Cuphead or Mugman (in single player or local co-op) as you traverse strange worlds, acquire new weapons, learn powerful super moves, and discover hidden secrets while you try to pay your debt back to the devil!

Paying debt to the devil is not an easy feat. Highly recommend for anyone who miss punishing 80s/early 90s run n guns. The 1930s animation style is also amazing to look at with surreal boss designs very similar to Silly Symphony.

The controls are very arcadey with 8 directional shooting, single jump, descending platforms and a special attack, but it also adds parrying and dash, which were way less common back then. 

Every boss has multiple phases, and are only 1-3 minutes long, but due to everything you gotta dodge all the time without much breaks just one minute can feel way longer. The boss phase transformations are very surreal and they can go from being a couple battletoads turning into a slot machine or a bird stuck in a bird house to a featherless bird carried in a stretcher spitting up its heart that attacks you. You can choose between fighting them in simple or regular mode. Simple mode gives you linear patterns, while regular they will be random, so you have to be more careful with what the boss will do next. You can only get a contract by playing on regular mode (required to advance the game), but simple mode is okay for practicing the patterns. The difficulty of the bosses curves really well too. It starts out a little rough, but gets really challenging at the second island, and even more so at the third island. Then the finale after that is a true Satan's work.

Platforming sections, which were added later in development and got the game delayed are actually pretty good too. They really feel like old arcade platformers. Most platformer levels also have a miniboss at the end, so they're still not bossless (even a Mega Man 2 reference in one of them). The intensity of them are on the same scale as the boss fights, you won't be running around without enemies coming at you from multiple directions. Only thing I thought could be done better is hiding the coins, they're a little too easy to obtain, so most of the challenge is just finishing the stage itself with a good rating. You generally won't have to replay the level just to try and find coins you couldn't. 

But on the topic of coins, you can find hidden things in the overworld. Some characters will reward you with a coin for doing things for them and there are a few hidden paths granting you a coin or a shortcut to later levels. It's a really nice touch I wasn't even expecting from this type of game.

The replayability is also great for with expert mode being unlocked after beating the game and trying to get S rank for every boss. There is also a pacifist rank for platform stages where you have to beat the stage without killing anything, which can be tricky since most stages have midbosses or walls that you need to find ways to skip.

I had been waiting for this game for years, and it honestly went beyond my expections. It's definitely one of my favourite games after just 10 hours and hope you all buy it, it's a very rare gem you won't see much of in modern gaming. -Pomikuza!