izigame.me

Updated review

Summary

Happy, cheerful, easy, and relaxing
A great game for your child to get into gaming, or play something inoffensive for like 2 hours or so. Whilst adults will have no trouble completing the game quickly, younger audience might take some more time to finish this game.
Whilst it's good and mostly bug-free, you can complete it in 3-5 hours, it's not exactly directly better than the previous game.
I do hope they release a new DLC with more minigames, more of the world to explore and fix Misty's animations (more on that in the bug/issues section).
Anyway, here's my boring review because I had time to write this.
The game
It's simple, you have 2 characters at the start, each comes with mostly different abilities and you get more characters as you progress in the game. They all have a unique ability that you have to use to get past "puzzles" and obstacles.
"Puzzles", because these are so easy a child can figure them out, everything is basically shown to you the moment you start it, so it's more of a "go there and pick that up" type of thing, "then come back". Not exactly, challenging.
It's a children's game, so graphics don't really matter much, they're simple enough that they should run on any PC. BUT....
After playing on my save file for a little while, I noticed how much choppier and laggier it gets, around 2-3 hours playtime. It's -- a little jarring. I tested on 3 computers, laptop, my main pc, and my craptop, its the same issue across all devices, doesn't matter how good your pc is. On SSD my load times were long, very long, that I started to wonder "is this on HDD?", but I double checked, it's not. So I can only imagine how bad it is for HDD users.
It feels like, the optimization here is not as well done as the previous game (which was done by a different studio according to Steam).
Actually, I think the graphics were better in the previous game to be honest.
Then there are the minigames, which are the same as they were in the previous game, nothing's changed. Like I'm not joking, it's the same minigames, with I think 2 new ones, but I haven't played them since you don't really get rewards here for completing them, as far as I can tell.
With this new game, they could have upgraded the minigames to make them at least a little more challenging on hard difficulties, like add extra obstacles, or add powerups that change the gameplay up. The dancing minigame was more interesting in the previous game too, since the screen changed and camera angled changed, when you pressed the buttons. It just happens whenever in this game.
The sounds are also-- weirder. It feels like the VAs didn't exactly put their best in this one. Their grunts and cheers and all that are -- little less enthusiastic than previous installement. The music is your generic music you have in shows when characters enter an area so there's nothing here to brag about either, but it was the same in the previous game.
It's big. Like you have 7 maps in total, 2 are almost identical with some different obstacles in one. You have some gear to customise your ponies with to collect and some furniture. The Lighthouse makes me sad, because it seems like such a cool place to have all the characters you collected hang out there, but it's just you. There is, literally, no point in the lighthouse. Why is this part of the game in here even, the Lighthouse is useless, much like in the previous game. You could have missions, or quests all in the Lighthouse, so you won't have to run around town like a lunatic looking for quests, then the Lighthouse would be useful.
The Bugs and issues
Okay, so, there are few.
Many times you collect objective related items before you are supposed to. It does not break the game, but it breaks the Objective Finder, it often points you to the previous area. ON top of that, the stuff you collected is still there when you come there when you're actually supposed to, despite being collected earlier.
I don't know what's up with Misty, was she an afterthought? It kinda feels like it, it kinda feels like this game was supposed to be a bigger remake of the previous game, because it feels like her animation is missing. I come up to "cheer up" some ponies and they're just standing there giggling like buffoons and I get my stars... It's not exactly, engaging.
Then like I mentioned the lagging/jagging/chugging issue. For me it started happening after like 2-3 hours when I started noticing it at least. At 5 hours it started to get really annoying. I had performance monitor on the other screen and there was no other activity than the game really. I think it has something to do with the save file, or how the game loads things, which bogs down certain parts? I'm unsure, I didn't analize it too hard.
But yeah that's all the issues I had.
Conclusion
Overall it's not exactly a better game than the previous one, it's not bad however.
There are some things I wish they could have done better, but I guess children games are not exactly--- area for innovations, or high payroll, so why bother.
I bet the devs tried here, but there are a lot of missed opportunities in many areas that I think could have made the game much much more engaging and could have blown this game higher than the previous game, but they didn't happen and they would have to start over to fix them, so that's not coming.
Here's hoping a DLC comes along that expands the world and characters, with new minigames, maybe a new map, like a visit to Maretime Bay again. Would be cool.
Here's hoping.