Super Splatters - Review
Few games are as happy to be here as Super Splatters. Its delightfully tongue-in-cheek writing and happy-go-lucky characters are quite literally bursting with charm, flinging their jelly-like bodies around the stage before exploding into gooey cascades to the cheers of their insatiable audience. Super Splatters is so unconcerned with being taken seriously, so committed to making you laugh and smile, that it’s hard not to forgive some of its more frustrating parts for the sake of how much fun it’s having.
Super Splatters is all about skill in an environment you wouldn’t expect to demand it. Your goal isn’t to do good yourself, but impress the audience watching you and in turn earn fans to help propel you to the next level of splatter stardom. You do this by making an absolute mess, shooting your wiggly body toward small balls you need to cover with your explosive fluids in order to clear a level. The challenge is you’re only given a limited number of goo-people and balls are typically spaced out so as to require a lot of tricky maneuvering to catch them all.
For a game seemingly aimed at more casual players, Super Splatters has an abundant amount of depth in its scoring system and outrageously difficult level designs later on. Different shots activate stunts, the more of which you chain together the higher your combo gets and the more fans you’ll receive. This becomes fiendishly complex when you have to deal with multiple colors, required stunts, and an increasing number of spikes ready to prematurely split you open.
Issues only arise when Super Splatters’ somewhat luck based design begins to feel as if it’s working against you. As you’re required to clear every level entirely, it’s not uncommon to end up with a single ball remaining do to you goo somehow not penetrating a stack enough, or slipping through the floor faster than you’d anticipate. Later stages are positively infuriating at times, testing my patience with little in the way of direction, and losing much of the cheerful dialogue that made earlier levels such a joy.
Final Word
Maybe that’s a bit of a baseless complaint though as there isn’t ever a reason you’re forced to play past a comfortable difficulty. Super Splatters is fully focused on giving you as much or as little a challenge as you want, so outside ofcompletionists there’s never a forceful urging to push you outside your comfort zone. And that’s something I find really refreshing: a game so completely devoted to having a ridiculously good time that you can’t help but enjoy yourself.