Rude Bear is hanging out in East London. He’s a bit of a ‘gangsta’, hanging out with his mates, Rad Boar and Robed Bird when a wizard kidnaps him and whisks him away back in time to Medievil England to overcome challenges.
I’m not sure why. But that synopsis had me hooked and I’m so glad it hooked me, because Super Rude Bear Resurrection is amazing.
Super Rude Bear is an absolutely brutal platform game. Levels are fairly quick, but you will die a lot. A massive amount. Best described as a ‘twitch’ platform, it’s fast paced and requires serious precision.
Super Meat Boy is the most obvious comparison, as you navigate through themed worlds, beating bosses at the end and encountering more and more devilishly designed traps. Whereas Meat Boy favoured instant repetition when you die to achieve perfection, Super Rude Bear promises itself as a platformer that ‘anyone can beat’. You see, once you die, your corpse is left.
This sounds a bit gruesome but it has a key benefit – you can stand on these corpses. So if you get impaled on some spikes, when you respawn (via the power of the The Wizard) you can just on your body to protect you from that bit of the level which killed you. Certain elements of levels where your body can’t stick to (such as rotating blades) break off when you hit them – whatever you’re doing, the level gets easier the more you die.
Criteria for winning then is based on how many Rude Bears you killed on your way. This is a really novel element to this type of game and through persistence I managed to complete the game, and it was frustrating at times but I always knew that with every death I was taking steps closer to finishing the level. There are a few points where even with lots of dead bears around, it’s still hard, but nothing too insurmountable.
Buried within some levels (like all good platformers) are hidden secrets which open up an alternate – and extra hard – route. This makes for lots of exploratory opportunities in the game and helps open up the main game marathon and ultimate marathon options: basically a timer on completing the entire game in one sitting.
Super Rude Bear looks really cute, and is suitably bloody but it can get a bit hard to tell sometimes if a corpse is fully covering a trap, or if you’d land on it and get killed because it doesn’t quite. This isn’t ideal but I didn’t find it happen too frequently, plus, what’s one more death when you’ve already died 200 times on a level?
There are extra difficulty options for the full-blown masochists out there, removing the option of breakable traps or corpses laying around. From seeing some people on Twitch playing this, there are some very talented individuals. However as of writing no one has managed a Platinum trophy on PS4 (which requires a scary zero deaths) and the developers have offered a $50K price for the first person to manage this. I can only imagine the state of that person.
Super Rude Bear Resurrection is great fun. It’s challenging but not unfairly so, and has a great sense of humour throughout. The developers get that different elements may not appeal, so have added options for timers to be shown to help with speed runs, the chat of the Wizard to be disabled in case it’s off-putting, and a few other bits which help customise the experience. I can’t recommend it enough.
Reviewed on PS4
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