Coinciding with the launch of the Xbox One X this week, MS Studios have a new 3D platformer out called Super Lucky Tales. Super Lucky Tales sees you controlling a cute fox, navigating a lush colourful 3D world putting gollums back together and collecting 4 leafed clovers (there are 99 to collect in total and I’m well in to double figures now!).
The game is described as follows by Microsoft:
“Super Lucky’s Tale” is a delightful, playground platformer for all ages that follows Lucky, the ever-optimistic, energetic and lovable hero, on his quest to find his inner strength and help his sister rescue the Book of Ages from Jinx. Jinx is the scheming and mysterious villain trying to reshape the world, but for what reason?
Along the way, encounter a hilarious supporting cast of friends and adversaries. Lucky must confront the nefarious Kitty Litter, Jinx’s mischievous kids – self-taught villains who might not be getting Jinx’s plans quite right. Lucky meets friends and allies along the way too. He meets misplaced Yetis, Kooky Spookies, a village of farming worms and other colourful friends inhabiting of Ages.”
I played Super Lucky Tales at the Xbox Loft the other week and found the two level demo great fun. It looked lovely in 4K on the Xbox One X, but since I don’t have one of those (yet!), I played the review copy Microsoft kindly provided me with on my Xbox One S. The game still looks lovely, although obviously not as lovely as it does in 4K!
Right from the start, the thing I loved about Super Lucky Tales was the variety. Within the first hour of play, I’d experienced 3D platforming, 2D speedrun levels (the scrolling rate is fixed, so you have to time jumps perfectly), puzzles, and exploration, along with some great boss fights.
The world is colourful, the cut scenes are fun (but should be skippable if you chose to replay levels for the collectables), and the whole thing hangs together very nicely.
Like a lot of games now, Super Lucky Tales has replayability built in from the ground up. The ultimate aim of the game is to collect 99 4 leaf clovers (lucky, get it?), as well as completing the story, and this will often require the replaying of levels. A lot of the levels have more than one way of completing them too- I got stuck on the first 2D level because I didn’t realise I could take an easier route by bouncing off the head of one of the cutsey monsters that roam the map.
When I unleashed the kids upon it, they enjoyed it more than a lot of the other platformers I’ve exposed them to (Mario, Sonic and Rayman in particular). The difficulty level helped them a lot; bizarrely a lot of the cutesy platform games out there are rock hard and entirely not aimed at children- the difficulty curve just puts them off. On the flip side, some of the games more aimed at kids (particularly the toy to game titles like Skylanders) offer so little challenge that the kids get bored with them pretty quickly.
Super Lucky Tales is then good fun. It’s not perfect- I managed to get into a couple of positions where the game couldn’t continue until I died as I wasn’t supposed to actually get Lucky there, but there was nothing game breaking, and like I said, it’s perfectly pitch . The other aspect that greatly adds to Super Lucky Tales charms is its price: £19.99. That’s a whole lot of game for the price, and offers terrific value for money.