Bacon Man: An Adventure Reviews

Good level design, nice art and music too. Fun action platforming reminiscent of Megaman and some melee moves like Guacamelee. Quirky food-based theme, but it's not too in-your-face either. The humor adds some fun... I get some Crash Bandicoot vibes for the humor. Overall fun to play but it's definitely a tough platformer. Thankfully there isn't too big a consequence for death other than restarting from a check point. Recommend playing with a controller because at least for me, the keyboard controls were not immediately obvious.

Bacon Man is a pretty good game. An enjoyable art style, with fantastic illustrations, a colourful palette, and charming character designs. The level design is quality; harrowing threading-the-needle jumps with secrets peppered around, which is split pretty evenly between having to explore hidden pathways and having to risk a harder route. The checkpoints are geographically close to each other, and yet they feel much farther away. When you manage to get a rhythm going, and blast through a section in one fluid movement, it feels super rewarding, especially as the movement in this game feels good - with special mention going to how great Bacon Man's toaster jumping feels. The soundtrack is fantastic; it's varied, engaging, and helps set the stage. While the game's wacky and somewhat sociopathic sense of humour may not be for everyone, it's gotten plenty of grins and my weird chimp laugh out of me. The boss fights are all creative, and visually interesting. However, it is not without flaws: A lot of the animations seem rather robotic. Though I'm sure the devs have sound reasoning behind it, the fact that I'd have to level the characters individually is a pain, and dissuades me from using anybody other than Bacon Man - especially as you have to replay the levels that unlock special abilities, such as the dash, with each character to unlock said ability for them. Furthermore, you can't freely switch character from the map screen, instead having to return to the main menu to go to the load game screen. At times, the hitboxes for the spikes can feel over-sensitive: I've often died from what looks like a single pixel touching a single pixel, but maybe my eyes are playing tricks on me. My main issue, however, is the combat. I'm sorry guys, but I just don't dig it. While there is animated feedback for when people take a hit, it's not particularly satisfying. Enemy AI is erratic and unpredictable, and I seldom felt that their placement added anything to the challenge, instead just being a bloody nuisance. If the mooks were all glass cannons, I feel they'd add more to the game. Despite this, Bacon Man is, overall, a highly enjoyable platformer, full of charm and challenge, and I've had a hard time putting it down. As it stands - a small studio's first original game - it's a bloody good time, and I've high hopes for Skymap's future.

Although I'm having an astounding amount of difficulty with the game ( it is hard for me ) I still have to give it a recommendation. The game is good and the devs have been very responsive. I just need to get better.

I don't like it. The game is too easy, the combat is boring, movement is slow and feels like you're on the moon, platforming is tedious as hell, and the levels you're platforming through are poorly designed. That's really all I can say. 24 minutes into the game, I get into this cave full of floaters and spikes, designed like something you'd expect from I Wanna Be the Guy, except the placement of the floaters is so close that you're constantly having to run the analog stick back and forth to course correct. Even "I Wanna" games, for all of their absurd precision platforming difficulty, understand the concept of designing levels so that they flow nicely. You aren't sitting there constantly jittering your movement back and forth to fight against an unnaturally floaty jump arc combined with tiny platforms. I died probably six times in this room before I decided to quit and refund the game. And that's where the distinction between difficulty and tedium becomes important. I can knock out a needle platformer in an afternoon. They are difficult, and the difficulty makes victory rewarding. I can sigh in relief and feel satisfied. This room, on the other hand, was tedious. And tedious is all that it is. Had I bothered to sit down for a couple more attempts to get past that room, I would not have felt accomplished. I would have only felt annoyed. And that's this whole game. Every room up to that room where I quit was plagued with the very same tedium. Not once did I feel a sense of enjoyment, accomplishment, or like I had overcome a challenge. It felt more like I was going through the motions of a non-exciting, everyday task, like making a sandwich. I only needed 24 minutes to observe this and make up my mind, which just goes to show that playtime is not a qualifier for the validity of opinion. Quantity vs Quality. I may have only played for half an hour, but it was a thoroughly poor quality experience. TL;DR If you're expecting a tight platformer with polished combat, this is not the game for you. If you like boring moon physics and unchallenging yet tedious platforming, then by all means.

Bacon Man: An Adventure in good and bad upsets The "too lazy to read the rest of this summary" summary: The gameplay is generally good and challenge is frustrating but rewarding, but you will encounter numerous mostly minor bugs. Bacon Man is a platformer that feels like it's got some heart behind parts of it's construction, but it's missing a very much needed polish and an extra run from the Q&A department. It's clearly harkening back to the strange world and hubris of Earthworm Jim, where you have a comical world of cartoonish characters with some generally light hearted writing behind it that I'm sure younger players would enjoy, slapstick a common occurance during most cutscenes. The humour however is slanted slightly by the fact that the main characters don't really emote outside of body gestures, faces are plastered on, yet you have a character in the form of "The Pork King" who despite being a way simpler design than the protagonists comes off as a much more expressive character in his animations. This tends to apply to many of the side-characters that I have seen so far, who are put on screen next to the protagonist group and tend to be more interesting to watch. Gameplay is the game's true strong point however, offering up well designed levels that actually offer up a challenge to what is advertised on the store page. Death can come swiftly and sometimes you need to plan out how to actually proceed ahead through an area. Using enemies as kicking posts to guide yourself through the air, dashing off walls into double jumps into air dashes to navigate around to a safe patch not covered in spikes, firing off shots to lure out charging crushing/spiked sentient blocks, the environment is the meat of this game. While most levels are mainly linear, there are some levels with branching pathways that tend for you to go down one to unlock another. Treasure Chests tend to be scattered across levels, with money (YUMS), equipment and art to be looted. While there is combat, it is rather basic with a melee and ranged attacks (also guarding), while ranged attacks can be customized rather heavily with equipment, your melee is going to be a rather short spammable beatdown of sorts. While all enemies can be beaten till they explode, most smaller enemies can be beaten to near death and then picked up, to be used as a thrown weapon or to be sacrificed into the nearest water hazard to create a platform upon it. You earn experience and YUMS to be spent at shops to upgrade yourself. As entertaining as the core game is, it is held back by some mildly irritating bugs. So far I've experienced audio glitches, strange blurry textures on certain objects in the environment as if they didn't load in properlry, died to random floor geometry on a forced scrolling level, had one boss that got stuck in an attack animation loop and another just suddenly die before I ever landed the last necessary hit. Nothing I've seen has stopped my playthrough outright, but when it unfortunately happens in tandem it really does lower the enjoyment of everything. I really hope this game gets some much needed patching, there's a diamond in the rough here and it's just needs to be cleaned up a bit.

Bacon Man: A Recipe For Success I just completed my first blind playthrough of this game solely as Bacon Man. This review is based on those first impressions. Gameplay I played with an Xbox 360 controller. Controls were tight. Other reviews had said as much, but I felt entirely in control of Bacon Man at all times. This means that any failure I may have encountered stemmed from my own mechanical inability, impatience, and the occasional generous hit detection, which means that success is all the more satisfying. From a mechanical standpoint, imagine that Mega Man X, Donkey Kong Country and Castlevania: Symphony of the Night had a threesome and birthed a delicious, greasy baby. The inspiration of other platformers is rampant and glorious. As a longtime fan of the Donkey Kong Country series, I was pleased to see mechanics like throwing enemies and hanging from ceilings present. There is also a co-op mode, but because I am sad and friendless I haven't been able to make use of it, so I can't judge it. Difficulty and Level Design The game includes an organic and inobtrusive tutorial a la Donkey Kong Country where the player is taught the controls for an action and then left to overcome a challenge that allows you to utilize your new skill. This is a HUGE oversight in many games these days, and I appreciate the developers putting it in. I was never left scratching my head about controls. Levels are generally cleverly designed and entertaining to play. The difficulty scales as the game goes on and as Bacon Man unlocks more skills and movement abilities. Starting off at maybe a Donkey Kong Country level of difficulty, the later levels are more reminiscent of Super Meat Boy or I Wanna Be The Guy. Needless to say, at my current skill level I think it's highly unlikely that I'll ever get the achievement for beating this game without dying. Levels are full of branching paths and hidden caches, some of which seem to only be reachable with one of the other playable characters, or so I imagine, leaving room for replayability. Aesthetics and Graphics The game is built on the Unreal 4 Engine, so naturally it's pretty to look at, but the developers have gone above and beyond to produce quality backdrops and environments. Each zone is quickly and easily distinguishable from others and they all lend themselves well to the food group aesthetic the design team seems to be going for. The character models, while on the smaller side, are pretty good though with a little more budget could have been A+ material. Obstacles are usually clearly defined. Whether you'll like the camera view distance is a matter of personal preference; Skymap seems to have been going for a Super Meat Boy era camera, and while I understand that such a distant view almost entirely negates the concept of a "leap of faith", a platforming taboo, such distance makes it much more difficult to fully appreciate all the effort that went into producing the compelling and detailed character models and decent animations. Soundtrack Excellent with some very memorable tunes. Each song lends itself well thematically to the zone it belongs to. If I'd know it was going to be so good, I'd've thrown another 8 bucks at the total/complete edition and saved myself two dollars. Game sounds are clear, and both soundtrack and sound effects are individually adjustable in the options. Story Goofy and campy; if you don't play platformers for their story then there's a convenient skip feature, but for those of us who enjoy a good yarn the woeful tale of Bacon Man's quest for redemption is inspired by the humor of Earthworm Jim and goes full No More Heroes closer to the end in terms of zaniness. There were times I caught myself actually laughing out loud. In the same vein as a Suda51 game there seem to be several purposefully laid plot holes that I can hopefully conclude will be resolved by future playthroughs as the other characters. In short, I personally was entertained, but tastes will vary. Overall Highly, highly recommended. Bacon Man is a tasty treat, and I appreciate my friend for serving him up to me. The developers seem highly active, there is a patch for some bug or change nearly every day since I've bought it, so it's nice to see that they're not content with their current receipe and will and continue to improve this title. Quite frankly, one of the few things I'm disappointed about is that my plate's empty. I can only hope the crew will cook up some DLC maps or storylines soon!

This game is amazing. If you enjoyed platforming games like Mega Man games, Donkey Kong Country, Rayman, Earthworm Jim, etc. - you will enjoy Bacon Man. This game has all the right things to create a great platforming game - such as challenge, awesome music, tough jumps, hidden chests, and humor. There are epic battles scattered throughout this game...such as against Excaliboar and Feta. If you'd enjoy a nice challenge the first time through, face Feta "blind". He really is a great "boss" battle and is very rewarding once you best him at the end of the Colocheeseum. Boss battles aside, the re-attempts you may face in a level will most likely be due to rushing through a situation before thinking, rather than the controls being the issue. The controls handle nicely. I purchased this game release, and my goodness, it has it been updated nearly each time I have logged into Steam - even twice or so in the same day! The developers definitely show they care with this awesome, little gem. You can tell these folks put a lot of effort (and continuing effort) into making this a better game than it already is. If you grew up playing games in the 80s and throughout the 90s, give Bacon Man a try!

I had the opportunity to play early versions of this game and have always been blown away with the level of detail and quality these guys bring to this game. I think their goal was to simulate how you might feel if you ate ten pounds of bacon and they nailed it! Be warned, you will likely sweat a lot, your chest will tighten, and your left arm will tingle a bit but that’s what you expect from a tougher than nails game. I give this 10 out of 10 and, assuming I keep a defibrillator nearby, can’t wait to play all the way through this one!

Disclaimer: I really wish Steam had a neutral review option. I don't want to be harsh Cute 2D platformer with 3d graphics. It's very retro, taking a lot of inspiration from late 90s early 2000s games. The artwork and level themes feel unique, and the chacters are different enough to feel replayable. The sound track is excellent- combining the retro feel with modern quality. Plus it's actually finished. My playlist lately has been entirely early-access and Paradox games so this is notable to me. Unfortunately, the game also took the stupid checkpoints from those retro games. Forcing players to replay the same frustrating section for each new attempt at an inst-kill obstacle isn't fun and isn't real difficulty. There are multiple sections like this- just enough simple puzzles and just enough faffing about to make the game a chore. When I got to a point where I think a checkpoint had outright been removed for the lols*, I rage quit. The game also makes no attempt to be playable with a keyboard. It's possible, but there's no rebinding and no prompts re: which keys correspond to what without a lot of trial and error. If you're not using a controller, definitely don't buy this game. The writing is also a bit lackluster, falling back on the "look how bad this dialogue is" joke far too often to be funny and the bosses take a bit long to kill to be fun, but at this point I'm just picking holes. If you enjoyed platformers back in the day and could repeat the same section a dozen times without wanting to smash your controller, this might be the game for you. If you're not a masochist, play something else. *In case a dev reads this- it's the bit after the excaliboar fight. You go through the long air vent, kill two monsters, cling a wall above a vent then dash onto another wall, shoot a guy, drop down, do a shooty puzzle with risy and fally bits, dash through another guy, do a shooty puzzle in a very confined spike-lava area (which killed me a lot- so do the above again a few dozen times), kill the pointy hatted guy, then have to jump on a floating thingy. There's a long corridor and you change the type of challenge the player is facing. And the fact that I have it memorised should show how many times I had to do the damn thing.

I really want to like this game. It's got a great soundtrack, a clear idea for art direction, and some gorgeous 2D work in the menu backgrounds and especially achievements. But man, the controls are just so floaty and rough, the animations look awkward, and the general look and feel is just half-baked. I have no idea what it wants to be, and it plays that way; part MegaMan, part Mario, part lots of other indie games- but never quite good enough at any of it to stand out. It just feels off to play, and while I intend to keep going- these are my thoughts as it stands. I feel like it bit off more than it could chew, and a smaller, more intimate pure platformer- with that gorgeous 2D art they tease us with- could be a real winner. Oh, and Lard Lass is bae- please, give us more of her and her loveliness.