Curse of the Crescent Isle DX

I played the original version of this game way back in 2011 when it was up for sale on Xbox Live's Indie Game Marketplace and when I saw that a updated DX version had been released I knew I had to get it.

The game has a very Mario Brothers 2 feel with the gameplay element of riding on top of, picking up, and throwing enemies but includes the added touch that some enemies have special properties that can be used in the level including freezing water and enemies, enlarging them, breaking rocks, or reversing gravity which adds some freshness to the gameplay. It's not a very long game however and you can easily beat it in less than an hour.

Unlike the original version this DX version adds several new features, The original had 8-bit NES style graphics while this new version sports 16-bit style graphics with much more animations, colors, and gfx effects not found in the original and the music has been completely redone. Sometime though I preferred the original 8-bit inspired tracks but the new ones are just as good if its you're first time playing this game. In addition, it also adds the Queen as a playable character, a password system, and 2 added modes that are a Boss Rush mode and a Speed Run mode which adds some replayability to extend your short romp through the Crescent Isles.

Some annoying aspects to this DX version are several bugs that can be frustrating such as enemies becoming ungrabbable if placed directly on the edge of a platform which if its an enemy with an ability essential to beating the stage will stop you from beating it but the game has an option to restart the stage you are currently on so you can retry if it happens. Sometimes button presses can lag which might result in falling into a pit but its not something that makes the game unplayable.

Overall this is a decent game. If you've played the original this one is worth checking out for the added content but if its your first time playing you will definitely enjoy it.

Curse of Crescent Isle is too clunky for it's own good. It's missing some of the qualities one might expect from a game where you can jump on, pick up, and throw enemies. For example, you cannot simply throw an enemy as a double jump or throw an enemy mid-jump for a higher jump. Instead, you have to wait around until the enemy is in the right position for you to use it as a stepping stool. This gets particularly annoying when you're forced to carry enemies up to small platforms and then throw them so as not to injure yourself while landing the enemy in just the right spot.

Adding insult to injury are the touches like the long respawn times and the instant death pits.

I'm sure this is all very engaging for platformer fanatics and retro-platformer fans especially. For mere mortals, the combination of mechanics here are tedious or annoying.

This is a short platformer game, in which you select to play as the princess or the future prince, to save your country of the curse of the bad magician. The controls are really nice and consists mainly in jumping and picking enemies. The game saves in each room you arrive. This a good point, since some of the rooms are really challenging. The boss battles are really good and makes good use of its simple mechanics. The story is nice and fits well with the experience. The level design is very good and even though the gameplay is simple, it always adds new elements to the challenge.

It's about time to release a fully fledged version, Aye?

I think this game changed controlls. I remember it was worse and more jerky, and I installed it recently and was surprised. Character surely controlls better. Anyway I don't like graphics and gameplay much.
Edit: yeah it's still a frustrating garbadge. The main part of frustration comes from this game's slow pacing (even old good mario is faster paced game) and precise mechanics of jumping. Because of this I end up locking myself from reaching platforms several times because I throught some object on the highter platform. Or you could just throught away enemy which important to proceed to the next puzzle. This game should be called Curse of the Thousand Softlocks DX.

This game has a cute mechanic of using and riding enemies with different abilities. While not comepletely unique (Little Nemo), its one that isn't done too often and is well implemented here.

The game plays smoothly and it was worth playing through again just to get all the coins and such.

It'll be a relatively short experience for sure, but the price is reflective of that and it's still really good. If your steaem library is mostly composed of retro style games like mine, this'll be a good addition to it.

not good, not bad. only buy if it is on sale

★★★☆☆

Tags: Platformer
Additional Tags: Delete Local Content & Remove from Library

TLDR: Shoestring Budget "Shantae" type game. A few good ideas and a lot of shortcomings, some bugs and little content. Stick to better fleshened and polished titles instead.

CCIDX has you going through 4 small worlds, that are elemental themed, with rather simple map layouts as well as simple miniature puzzles here and there. The game lasts 3 to 4 hours in a single play session to beat in its entirety. Personally I gave up halfway through as I started hitting too many bugs.

Hitboxes would not detect correctly at times, damaging you, the use of pick-able enemies that you could use to enable temporary abilities on your protagonist was a stroke of genius but came off as underutilized and sometimes broke the game. For example Freezing fireballs with the ice minion so you can use them as temporary platforms would sometimes cause the fireballs to destroy themselves and no longer fire, indicating that something in the scripting broke.

The characterization of everything had a faint but characteristic SJW taste to it as well. With people telling you they are dreaming of roasted frogs. Frogs "flaming you" and you having to freeze them in their track. There is the overweight anti-fat shaming NPC lady that vaguely hits on you.

None of that would matter if the game itself was polished, with more content, more minion interactions, multiple pathways to solve a level perhaps, or a better action/combat mechanic than simply throwing minions at other minions on rare occasions with imperfect results.

I also noticed a lot of screen tearing, it might be due to a Vsync issue or a framerate issue on my rig, but the effect only seems to come in these kind of low budget platformers and real polished titles rarely if ever display these kind of symptoms so I will hold that against this game.

This is about on part in quality with something like Akane the Kunoichi. Some good elements, but eventually the formula grows thin or has issues and it is difficult to continue play, even with the low amount of content on offer.

Game relies on on archaic and rather silly password system for progression. Menus are barebones and assets are not that diversified despite the quality of whats there.

The simplicity I could live with but the bugs and and issues make it a hard pass, even if you have children whom you think you could entertain with this, due to the frustrating half baked execution.

Even Akane was on the overall more engaging due to the action and had less technical issues.

Go play Owlboy, Cuphead, Gianna Sisters, Shantae or any half decent metroidvania. This is a hard pass for me. Removing local data and archiving with the rest of my hidden library of titles.

This game was not terrible and had some interesting gameplay mechanics, but I found the game to be too easy and too short. I beat the game in a single play session and managed to accumulate so many extra lives that there was never any real risk of losing.

Curse of the Crescent Isle DX caught my eyes almost instantly. The art design of the game pops reminding you of the glory days of the 16 bit era.

At first glance the game plays homage to such game series as Wonderboy and Shantae, but on closer inspection the game is way closer to Alex Kidd in Miracle World, Kirby and Super Mario 2. Why? Gameplay is linear and doesn't have any rpg elements like Wonderboy or Shantae, it is simple but it evokes a sense of adventure and being on a journey. By picking up enemies you gain that monster’s ability while you hold on to it and they can be used as stepping stones for more efficient platforming.

The music sounds like a classic Sega soundtrack, even the opening stage music reminds of the opening tunes from Wonderboy in Monster World and Sonic the Hedgehog. The sound effects are very effective, from the fire to the coins.

The story is generic but expected in the genre and the type of game it is. The plot is about a cursed kingdom and a stolen princess so you know what to expect. You get to choose from a male and female protagonist.

This game can be finished under 2 hours, but it has different modes to keep you interested in the game. The game is well worth its price, and aside from some minor and sometimes fun glitches the game runs perfectly.

The graphics and music are very nice, great graphics really. But gameplay is too much stop and go, if I'm going to play a retro platformer I want it to have a bit more natural rhythm to it.

This game might not be the pinnacle of 2D platformers, but I found it to be thoroughly enjoyable. The graphics and music are quite appealing and the game generally looks and feels polished. Aside from the usual platforming, the central mechanic of the game is picking up enemies and using them in various ways to traverse obstacles and defeat bosses. These features are fairly well implemented and even though the game is rather easy I found it satisfying to complete.

I feel that there is further potential for the ideas this game puts forward - I would really like to see more to this game, even if it was just extra levels. My first playthrough took just under two hours, which is fairly short. Subsequent playthroughs will take much less time to complete, although getting all of the achievements was good fun. Regardless, for the price of five dollars (at most) I would recommend that you give this game a shot.

8/10 Great fun for both your inner child & your actual children

Gameplay

Bugs

A minor Dent

Conclusion

Let's start with a PROS/CONS to make it easily digestable THEN move to more in-depth stuff.

This game is honestly not ready for primetime. I wanted to like it: a classic platformer built around picking up and throwing objects (like Super Mario Bros 2!), with visuals that look like 16-bit+, and a transplant from the defunct XBLIG store which holds a special place in my heart? Awesome.

Unfortunately it's not there yet. The first thing you're greeting by when you get past the start screen is an ugly menu with an enormous font, and about 15 menu options laid out in a two column grid. Even though the menu is a two column grid, you can't push left or right to navigate it, just up and down. The default key bindings are very poor, so I highly recommend you play on a controller. The game features a password system, which sounds like a fun bit of retro nostalgia, but the password system has the letters of the alphabet laid out in a grid... that you can only navigate by pushing up and down. The main menu says "Press Start", perhaps a holdover from XBLIG. If you go to exit you get this hideous developer mode prompt asking you if you're sure you want to exit in huge poorly aligned text strings going across the screen.

Why do I fixate on the menu? Because it's emblematic of how the game feels unfinished. Enter a level and you'll see that the "coin" count (actually is are only one coin per level, a "hidden" collectible--this could probably be done differently in the UI) is poorly aligned with the heart counter, which is vertical like SMB2 to its detriment.

When you move between levels, the map seems to load with the camera facing very far away and then whip across the level with blinding speed to get back to you--this is hard on the eyes and again feels unfinished. This wouldn't be a problem, except in a few levels the camera whips by enemies and plays their sounds, and many of the enemy sounds are very shrill and hard on the ears.

When you die, the sound simply stops and the game pauses for a second before fading the foreground to black. The effect looks very strange, the lack of feedback is bad, and it's slow. Consider what happens when you die in classic Super Mario Bros--the little ditty plays, the screen cuts to a lives counter (not applicable here), but I'm saying it shows how visual and audio feedback is part of how you design a game. That's not present in CotCI DX

Text boxes, which appear when you talk to characters in the game, has insufficient spacing between words so when you try to read the text it's difficult to follow.

There's visible tile seams, as you can see in the screenshot. Some bricks look fine but often the tile textures seem unfinished. The backgrounds are wildly inconsistent: some backgrounds, like the one you can see in the screenshot above with the pig king, have a cool parallax effect. Others are static images but animated. Several levels just have pure black backgrounds.

The entire game the camera feels a little too zoomed in. An important part of designing a platformer is ensuring the right balance between your character being large enough to see and provide details, but small enough so that jumping and moving feels good. Several levels feature points where it's difficult to see far enough around your character to see what you're doing.

Much of the level design is oddly boxy. Many of the levels are enormous, particularly those that use the gravity-inverting powerup to send you flying through a vast expanse. Big maps are generally a bad idea when designing a game, but they're a temptation for every first-time game designer. Then, platforming or puzzles levels typically are very small and cramped and much of the platforming involves putting low ceilings so that you can't jump near your full height. Because the main mechanic of the game is carrying objects and the developers want to force you to drop the objects to get past certain sections, I understand why they did this kind of cramped design, but it makes the levels feel kinda janky.

At least two levels that I noticed make it possible to get stuck mid level. One is the puzzle level around mid-way through where you need to pick up an orange guy at the beggining, boost on top of a column, and then throw a icicle guy right. The other is the final boss level, where if you accidentally drop your weapon in the (?) second last phase, you can't kill him. You can restart the current level through the menu, but again it's just a frustrating experience.

The final boss is pretty annoying in general. If you die, which is somewhat likely as you're learning his patterns, you restart at the beginning of the boss stage. This is fine, except you need to walk a few seconds to get to the boss and then talk to him, and then sit through a cutscene. This is a mistake that many professional games make, but it's annoying regardless.

The ending is weird, there's a smash cut from the final boss (no effect to see him dying or fade out or anything) into the ending, which is a static image with some text. The text looked like it didn't end properly, but no buttons I tried moved on to the next part of the text, except Enter/Start which just booted me back to the menu.

My playtime above includes idling the cards, but the game actually takes about 60-90 minutes. For replay you're encouraged to play as a second character, play a boss rush, and play a speedrun mode. I think this is fine value for money, but you should know what you're getting into.

In general this is a fun game and if you bought it I don't think you'd regret it. My issue is that this is not ready for release on Steam. Playtesting should have called attention to these issues and more, especially the menu/UI stuff which is immediately apparent. If this were an early access title, I'd recommend it and trust the developers would fix these issues, but this has been out for a while and has had some updates. It's beyond me why many of the issues I've raised in this review would have escaped the notice of the developer, and so the result is a game that feels sloppy and unpolished even though the core is a good looking, good sounding, interesting idea for a retro platformer.

I had bought the original Curse of the Crescent Isle on Xbox Live Indie Games back in the day. It's a short, sweet, unpretentious retro-style action game and I had a lot of fun with it, so the "DX" update had me excited. The new "Monster World IV"-style graphics are definitely really nice, but as much as I hate to say it, it makes the game feel a little more... janky?

The controls retain the weird, almost sort of "sticky" momentum from the XBLIG version of the game, and the jump physics still take some getting used to. When layered with the new, more detailed animations, these problems stick out even more. It also feels like the game doesn't quite utilize the new animations as well as it could, like my character was playing the wrong animations at the wrong times. The overall "game feel" could use some more refinement, because things are just slightly "off." These are kind of nitpicks, but it's little stuff like this that separates the Marios from the competition.

I appreciate that, while the original game was coded in XNA, this version of the game did not actually demand an Xbox 360 controller. I have one, of course, but I prefer to use my Playstation 2 Dual Shock through a USB adapter, and most games don't give me that luxury. Crescent Isle DX does, and I am thankful for that. That being said, it would appear that if I take more than two screenshots, the game screen disappears and I am left staring at a black window. It also crashes within seconds on my Windows 10 laptop. Neither of those things are great.

Would I recommend it? Yeah, I guess. This new version exposes some flaws that the older graphical style hid a little better, and the game is rough around the edges in other minor ways, but it's still playable and offers up a charming game mechanic. Plus, the new graphical style is pretty great. That's worth the asking price.

This game is a lot like Mario 2/Doki Doki Panic, but instead of picking up enemies to kill other enemies, you pick them up to move around the levels. It took some time to get used to the movement, but it works really, really nicely once you get the hang of it. Now, there are some glitches, but nothing major. I flew off the screen twice, but by picking up the enemy that put me up there I fell back into the world again.

It also has a password system (you get the passwords for each level by opening the pause menu) for easy access to levels you want to play around with.

Two characters to play with, one male and one female. I'm fairly certain they are identical gameplay wise, I didn't notice any difference at least.

All in all, this is a really fun (albeit pretty short) platformer that probably anyone who likes platformers can enjoy. Give it a try, why don't you?

TL;DR: Short, but great, "Curse of the Crescent Isle DX" is the combination of Monster World IV and Super Mario Bros. 2 you never knew you wanted. It's just not as polished as a true 16-bit classic, though it certainly has as much charm as the real McCoy. Absolutely worth it for $5 or less!
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"Curse of Crescent Isle DX" seems like it came straight from the Genesis/Mega-Drive. With it's closest cousins probably being Monster World IV and Super Mario 2 (with some Alex Kidd and Shantae resemblances to boot), and it's theme being a fresh take on some kind of loose Hindu-esque fantasy world, it absolutely demands attention from any fan of sidescrollers. Does it have the gameplay chops to back it up?

There are a few rough edges here or there and it sure is short, even with added modes like Boss Rush and Speed Run, but the answer is "Yes!"

Your main character - you can choose between a guy and a gal - isn't armed with a weapon and doesn't find new items. All they can do initially is jump, and talk to people (there's not a lot of story in the game, but the dialogue on some of the townspeople is very fun), but they soon gain the ability to pick up & toss enemies, and then shortly after that gain the ability to "flip" whatever they picked up and ride them. It's very similar to Super Mario Bros. 2, except with added depth in the form of elemental abilities on the enemies you're manhandling.

For example, one enemy is a frosty element guy - toss him into another enemy (or water) and you'll freeze them in place to use as a platform. Even fireballs, in classic video game logic fashion. There's a few kinds of elements here - drills, frosties, gravity switchers, size changers, etc. - so for the playtime, they provide good variety throughout. There's also great variety from the level designs, with many areas themed around different gimmicks. Areas with loads of stalactites and stalagmites are designed to be navigated by gravity flippers, for example. There are classic gimmicks like wind blowing sections and ice sections too. It's classic through-and-through. The boss fights are also classically styled, 3-hit, pattern recognition stuff that shouldn't test your patience, but are well made nonetheless.

The only problem is that the game just lacks some polish. It's not mechanically unpolished at all though. This game *feels* right - the character control is great (which is expected since they can't do a lot). However, the design of some areas tends to break things a bit - you'll throw enemies around and they'll get stuck on collision. Sometimes you won't take damage by slamming into something hurtful from the right angle. Or sometimes you'll get an enemy stuck somewhere and need to restart the current room from the pause menu. It's all tiny things, but they can be annoying nonetheless (especially, I would imagine, during the "Speed Run Mode")

Finally, for a game with good verticality to its levels, there's no way to look up or down. That's just obnoxious throughout. Blind jumps are always annoying, even if the game is super easy.

Overall, "Curse of Crescent Isle DX" is well-made and fun to play; it's just not perfect. Still, it's soooo cheap! Buy it if you like classic action games and sidescrollers. And lets hope that the developer Adam Mowery here gets to make a "Crescent Isle 2" or something someday that's a little more polished and a whole lot bigger :)

While only an hour long and some other minor enemy issues, I can recommend this game for a quick nosalgia trip to NES platformer games (especially Super Mario Bros. 2).

Back when Super Mario Bros. 2 came out, there was no such thing as "the Mario formula." Sure, SMB2 was much different from the previous game, but SMB was much different from Mario Bros., which was much different from Donkey Kong. We didn't know what to expect from a Mario game, so we didn't know just how much of an aberration SMB2 would turn out to be. Only later did we realize that SMB2 had strayed pretty far from the blueprint of a traditional Mario game, and although some elements of SMB2 turned up in subsequent games, the Mario series has never really gone back to that well.

Curse of the Crescent Isle does, though. It expands on SMB2's primary mechanics -- riding, lifting, and throwing enemies -- by allowing you to hold enemies over your head or under your feet, and also by giving enemies unique powers you can activate. These new wrinkles lend themselves to some interesting puzzles.

And the graphics? Completely adorbs.