Game #1208: M&M's Adventure

 I bet Smarties had this game made to make you hate M&M's 

 You thought M&M's Kart was bad? M&M's Adventure is here to see if it could get any worse. Honestly, I came at the game thinking it was a Crash Bandicoot rip off, turns out that was the PS1 game, but instead I got one of the worst platforming games I've played in recent memory.

 So you start off playing as Red and the first thing you'll notice is how awfully slow your movement speed is. Then you'll notice a missing door, with a floating handle, in the game's main hub, as well as a hallway that leads to nowhere. You can tell from the start that the game is unfinished at best, but broken at worst.

 Your main goal is to collect green M&M's, and progress is locked behind them. You need at least 80 out of 120 in order to open up the fifth, and final, world. By that part of the game it would mean collecting most, but not all, of the green M&M's available to you.

 The next thing you'll notice is that loading times are rather lengthy. And then how bad the collision detection can be. And it only gets worse. You cannot defend yourself from enemy attacks, if you are lucky you may be able, if the hitbox doesn't screw you over, to stun, very briefly, your enemy. That said, you are so slow, enemies are so fast and the hitboxes are so janky that avoiding damage feels impossible most of the time. There's no mercy invincibility, by the by. The flying enemies are the worst because you can't stun them and they follow you mercilessly. The fourth world, Halloween, is particularly nasty about it, in one section a moving platform must carry you from one place to another, and there's nothing you can do about the flying enemy, just take it and hope you make it to the end. It's absurd. I almost dropped the game on that world. 

 Unlike most other Platforming games, once you enter a world you must play every stage in order. Missed a green candy in the second to last stage? Too bad. Must replay the entire world. And if you die you lose anything and everything that you collected, oh no, you must make it to the end. And hopefully you remember how many green m&m's there are in that stage, as after you enter a stage there's no way to check.

 And the bosses? The bosses make no sense. For the Cherub you have to... wait, why the **** is a cherub a boss??? What does that have to do with M&M's or candy? So what if it's a Saint Valentine world, it still makes no sense. Anyways, you have to move towards a battery, so that if follows you, so that platforms will appear and you can jump on a switch and... electrocute him? What? Another boss you have to make him touch the green spray.... why? The Easter bunny has to be led to switches so that sometimes it gets a .... a nut? What? The only boss that made ANY sense was the Halloween boss.

 Well, guess what? There are two other playable characters, Yellow and Green. Each character has doors only they can go through and abilities unique to themselves. Kinda. Yellow is, actually, the only one with an ability, a double jump. Red's 'ability' is having flying stages, and Green's ability is that sometimes she gets a racket that must be used to repel some projectiles. It can't be used to harm enemies. This racket is used by swinging the Wiimote or... with the + button. Why not the unused B button? That'd make too much sense. Oh, and Green is under a time limit.

 Things of note: Sometimes Yellow and Green can skip some stages, but other times you'll have to go through stages that hold no Green M&M's they can collect. And while Red must play every stage in the first two worlds, from world 3 onwards sometimes he skips stages. Which is weird. For whatever reason, you cannot play stages as the other two UNTIL Red has found every single green M&M in a stage. Sometimes there are power ups, but they are very rare. I found an invulnerability power up on the final world, Christmas, and I think it got bugged 'cause I was invincible throughout the entire stage.

 M&M's Adventure is a masterclass in how not to make a platformer game. It's broken, it's unfinished, it's poorly made, but what's even worse than all of that... it's downright boring. The movement speed is just pathetic, it feels like going anywhere takes forever. There's nothing good I can say about it, and the cherry on top is that it actually made me dislike M&M's a bit.

1.5