by Maaaan, I just want to cut things.
–“Spoiler Alert?”–
Okay, so nothing’s worse than being at a playground and having a gym teacher blowing his whistle and telling you where to go and what to do. Unfortunately, this is where Tiny and Big: Grandpa’s Leftovers finds itself. You have this amazing power to cut a LOT of things. Sometimes, this includes massive structures hundreds of times your size. I don’t care who you are, that’s awesome, and the few times in TnB:GL that you get to do things like that is great. The problem is, the game is pseudo-linear, and starting at level 3, has an annoying jack-hat that does nothing but throw rocks at you… and this goes on until the end of the game.
I know it’s hard to tell from this picture… but that wall? That wall is coming down. Fast.
For some strange reason, the game developers of TnB:GL have given you this amazing power, but instead of putting you in an open world to explore and discover mysteries and treasures while you chew or… cut… the scenery, you’re forced into confrontations and boss fights, that frankly are not at all impressive. Generally, they consist of just moving from point A to point B, or worse, cutting a series of obvious platforms that the boss jumps to one by one.
The absolute worst, was the last level, consisting of a seemingly never-ending pit of falling down… down… and down, all the while requiring you to cut rafters and grafts out of the ceiling and walls to use as bridges. (It felt like a level from Deadcore, except in TnB:GL your personal locomotive abilities are limited to a slow walk and a short jump). This *sounds* good, but the implementation generally consists of falling off dozens of times, or being forced to restart because the rafter or graft did not fall the way you needed it to. Eventually, I discovered you could cheat out the fall-distance cap by cutting a piece of the floor you were standing on, then jumping on it and jumping off a couple times, essentially riding it down and resetting the fall distance with each touch of the platform. I used this to skip a few sections of the level.
Overall, this is an okay game, but not worth the initial Tier 1 impression. Definitely this is worth a Tier 2 rating, but all the while I played it, I couldn’t help but imagine design choices for the game that would have surely been better. I feel like an open world without levels would have been far preferable–even if the open world was only as large as the 5 levels from the actual game that we got. Likewise, boss fights should probably have never been a part of this game. In any way. Just let us cut things and pull down mountains. That part’s fun.
This used to be the front of a temple. I… might have turned it into rubble.