Rakoo & Friends (Wii U) Review

It feels wrong not to immediately discuss Rakoo & Friends's greatest feat, its presentation. The story begins with a gorgeously animated cut-scene, where the eponymous Rakoo chases after his lady love and is thrust into a world of auto-scrolling levels.

Really, the biggest pleasure of playing Rakoo & Friends is appreciating just how high quality it looks. Rakoo himself is incredibly fluid and the backgrounds seem like something out of a painting; it's all stylised wonderfully and is probably one of the best looking indie games on the Wii U at the moment.

Sadly, nothing else quite compares to the attention to detail and level of quality found in the presentation.

The actual gameplay is fun enough, but never exciting. Rakoo moves automatically, with the stylus or analogue stick being used for dodging obstacles and collecting the flowers and coins present in every stage, and he will gain access to "pets" as progress is made. The pets are cute little blob-like creatures that give Rakoo some pretty useful abilities at the expense of giving up one of his three hearts. As the difficulty is already fairly low and the pets are incredibly useful, this, unfortunately, makes little to no change to the overall difficulty and can even make things easier as one of the pets can restore lost hearts, creating a case of low-risk, high-reward.

The actual design of the levels is rather uninspired, as well. All 64 levels play the same and feature roughly the same obstacles and challenges. Rakoo will always run right, flowers will always have to be collected, there will always be three Rakoo coins to collect, and enemies will always try to run into the hero. The only difference from the first stage to the last is that there are more enemies in the latter.

Boss fights are disappointing, too, since they're effectively just playing a regular level, but now a boss is chasing after Rakoo. It feels like a real lack of effort.