izigame.me

Disclaimer: The game offers the ability to play with a friend, but I played through this one in single-player only.

The game was released in the PS4/XBox One generation and it's made in Unity, so I was a little worried going in that this wasn't going to run very well on my late 2010's i5 laptop. Thankfully it's smooth as butter. There's only really one boss fight in the DLC and a couple attacks in Rumor Honeybottoms' fight on the third Isle that cause consistent questionable performance, and that may just be a GPU issue.

Everyone's banged this drum already but Cuphead has really fun presentation. In terms of artstyle there's nothing else really quite like it on the market, outside of a couple direct imitators. That partially comes down to the sheer amount of time and effort necessary for drawing, colouring, painting all the assets. It is not cheap to make a game that does its best to look like a cartoon (albeit with concessions to the actual gameplay). At the same time, executives will decry the cost/time of a hand-drawn project as the reason not to go ahead with it, and then pump several hundred millions of dollars and half-decades or entire decades into homogeneous CG games and films, so it's really just a fob-off excuse - when people with money know what they want, they'll move heaven and earth to get it there. It was a warm surprise therefore for Microsoft to help market and bankroll Cuphead, even as the creators had to move their own heaven and earth to get it to release. The art direction is a fun breath of fresh air in an industry that's still chasing the polygonal glass ceiling even to this day.

(If you're a stickler for consistency like me, then the character animations all being at 24fps will clash with the player's movement, particle movement, background scrolling etc all running at 60fps. It can come off like things are disjointed. Those aforementioned attacks in Honeybottoms' fight are maybe also the only assets in the game that are computer-generated particles rather than hand-drawn. If you can get past all that or not notice it, you should be golden.)

Only a couple songs from the game really stuck in my head (the early few bosses such as the Root Pack and the battle theme for the mini-boss gauntlet near the end). This isn't to say the music's bad, it's great - it feels like a good 2010's recreation of the Scott Bradley school of cartoon composition, or something more akin to Christopher Willis, rather than Richard Stone handicapped by Tom Ruegger, or Carl Johnson and Joshua Moshier ("wahhhhhh") - it's just I was usually too busy concentrating on the mechanics to even pick up on sound cues telegraphing attacks, let alone the songs. Cuphead takes a fun cue from particular Fleischer cartoons where the voice actors would ad lib or mumble over character actions, and this comes through in the game, but it's easy to tune it out - for me at least - along with the game's other sounds.

Cuphead was built with consoles in mind and the controller seems to be the best option for ease of use, though I'm not keen on the default control layout itself. You can rebind keys in the options, however most all the buttons on a conventional gamepad are used except the two shoulder triggers (I used an XBox Series controller for reference), so there's little wiggle room. Regardless you should be able to set up, for example, shoot and dash on the triggers and be more comfortable that way. I've gone through the game entirely with the default layout.

I don't have any real issues as far as actual character movement or input response goes, it's as good as you could ask for from a platformer and a game that demands constant awareness. If you keep using super attacks while ignoring the detritus on screen, you're going to suffer (and I'm a slow learner for this sort of stuff). The amount of wiggle room you have, before your character overlapping with something registers as 'damage', is pretty vague but errs on the side of generous, favouring the player most times. You will learn the general boundaries of what not to touch through trial and error anyhow.

The meat and potatoes of the game is in the boss fights; there are nearly twenty in total, not counting the mini-bosses. By comparison there are two levels on each Isle focused more on straight platforming mixed in with gauntlets of enemies. These levels are technically not mandatory, but the majority of the coins for buying new weapons and charms come from these stages, and if you stick with the peashooter and no charms or weapons to swap out, you're going to make the experience much more frustrating for yourself. At the very least grab the Chaser and the Smoke Dash, then decide further down the road what looks good in the shop, or consult a guide. The game will also provide prompts through the NPCs to change your loadout, as there's no one universal solution to all the different fights - unless you're very stubborn about it. (Again, I was a slow learner.)

I would recommend at least playing through all of the regular mode, and would recommend the DLC if you've enjoyed the main campaign. Don't expect to ace any boss on the first try. Most all the bosses are satisfying to learn and overcome, though you do have to be comfortable with the idea of throwing yourself at a brick wall over and over until it starts crumbling down. The game's presentation is what helps mitigate that, so if you're low on patience or Cuphead's cartoon world doesn't do it for you, I would say skip this game altogether.

I personally would not recommend playing all the bosses on expert mode (or going for the pacifist run on the run 'n' gun levels) because at that point it stops being seasonably satisfying and becomes more of a slog, but your mileage will vary. Definitely don't beat the game on regular difficulty and then expect starting over on Isle 1 on expert will be a piece of cake, you'll be surprised. In other 'stuff I don't like'isms, there's a particular run 'n' gun level on Isle 2 where you need to reverse gravity frequently to advance, and it just feels frustrating advancing past some of the enemies like the walls and trombones. I'm definitely not a fan of Dr Kahl's Robot on the third Isle; even once you get a hang of the first phase and find a good order to break everything down, the second phase is kind of uninteresting and the third phase is a huge health sponge with some unfortunate foreground distractions that can make the phase feel unfair, almost luck-dependent. I'm also not a fan of Cala Maria's boss fight or the horse racing mini-boss for similar reasons, you can just end up with the stars aligning in the wrong way on some runs. The feeling of beating these bosses isn't satisfaction but "man, I don't want to do that again". Maybe that's sour grapes; other people are a lot better at consistent A/S ranks with these fights.

The DLC is slightly larger than the size of a regular Isle. Five main bosses, a mini-boss selection, an extra final boss and a hidden fight. The shop now boasts a broken trinket that works as an extra self-imposed challenge to use and unlock its full potential. You also get the option to play a new character that's mostly got it better than the brothers (extra health, invincibility on roll, double jump) but whose dash parry takes some getting used to and can make a couple boss patterns in the base game much more uncomfortable to deal with. This character's designed with the DLC bosses in mind (particularly the chess-themed fights) but there's nothing really stopping you from unlocking her early and then beating the main game that way, other than your own self-control.