If you were a child of the 90s or early 2000s, chances are you spent at least some time with Sonic the Hedgehog. Though many of the early 3D Sonic games don’t exactly hold up the best, many feel an intense amount of nostalgia towards them and yearn for a true spiritual successor.
Balan Wonderworld might just be that game, for better or for worse.
Balan Wonderworld is the newest game from Yuji Naka and Naoto Ohshima, Sonic the Hedgehog’s co-creators. Naka worked at Sega until 2006, heavily influencing just about every Sonic game that was released until his departure. Similarly, Ohshima worked at Sega until 1999, with his influence on Sonic’s world still being felt today.
Naka and Ohshima’s influence on Balan Wonderworld was clear. Putting it side-by-side to games such as Sonic Adventure, Sonic Heroes or Billy Hatcher and the Giant Egg made this abundantly clear.
With the game releasing in just a little under two months, hype was beginning to feel palpable. That was until Square Enix dropped a short demo of the game’s first level, revealing that Balan Wonderland may resemble those classic Sega games of old a bit too well.
Aside from a brief (albeit beautiful) opening cutscenes, players are not given any kind of set up for Balan Wonderworld’s demo. Who are we playing as? Who is that tall magic man with the white top hat? Who are the enemies? What are these cute little chicken things following the player around? None of these questions are even remotely answered.
Chances are the full game will dive a bit deeper into setup but, after about an hour with Balan Wonderworld, players will know just about as much going into the full game as they did before.
Balan Wonderworld plays just as one might expect. It is a traditional 3D platformer, with tons of collectibles for players to pick up throughout each level.
The core gameplay gimmick revolves around “costumes.” The first level features five costumes: Tornado Wolf, Jumping Jack, Pounding Pig, Dainty Dragon and Elastiplant. Each of these costumes gives different abilities that players can use to progress through the level and find secrets, but none of them were particularly exciting or fun to use.
For a game releasing on powerful consoles such as the PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X, Balan Wonderworld doesn’t look particularly impressive. It doesn’t look bad, but, outside of Ohshima’s character designs, nothing really stands out so far.
Perhaps the strangest offense that Balan Wonderworld commits in the technical department is how all of the NPCs scattered around the first level disappear when the player gets to close. This is glaringly strange and just doesn’t really make any sense… it just makes the game look less impressive.
At the very least, the PlayStation 5 port does utilize the DualSense controller. The adaptive triggers really do add to the immersion and fun factor in games, so seeing games take advantage of them is always a good sign.
While Balan Wonderworld is clearly going to be a family friendly game, the demo was far too easy. There aren’t really any puzzles and an extremely small number of enemies show up (they also all die in one hit).
The boss battle featured at the end of the level ends before it even really gets going. The boss itself has a wonderful design, so it was a shame that it made so little impact.
Balan Wonderland is a game with a ton of potential, but the recently released demo doesn’t inspire much confidence in the full game’s quality. With any luck, it will be the next great 3D platformer, but only time will tell.
