Balan Wonderworld Critic Reviews

If you have a soft spot for classic 3D platformers and imaginative game worlds, you'll have a lovely time with Balan Wonderworld. With a heartfelt story, plenty of cuteness, a clever costume system, and oodles of stages to master; it's one incredible adventure.

Balan Wonderworld has a strong artistic direction and an amazing soundtrack but also many limitations in terms of gameplay and graphics.

While not reaching its full potential, Balan Wonderworld is a grand and well designed adventure, which runs superbly on PS5. It’s perfect for family co-op play.

Mixed feelings: graphics and sound offer a surreal and engaging experience, but gameplay wise, several camera hiccups and uneven level design may become frustrating. Balan is able to appeal to your inner child... If that child is a patient one.

Balan Wonderworld is a great idea on paper, and it's perfectly playable from start to finish, but it's held back by some baffling design decisions and boring gameplay. The idea of a protagonist who swaps between costumes to collect Mario-style shines could be great, but the costumes are too simple, the environments are too boring, and the gameplay is too basic. It could possibly be a good game for extremely young players due to its low difficulty and cartoony graphics, but even then, I would recommend one of the many other offerings intended for that demographic instead.

If you’re the patient sort, chances are you’ll have a good time with Balan Wonderworld overall. Costume management is clunky, but you’ll deal with it in order to find the secrets hidden within each world, and you won’t be too perturbed by the eagerly respawning enemies and repetitive Balan Bout sequences. For most players though, everything combined will probably prove to be a little too much. Balan Wonderworld is a game that’s capable of bringing out both delight and dismay in its players, though it serves up a little too much of the latter at times to be easily recommended.

Balan Wonderworld is a passable platformer marred by a string of increasingly baffling design decisions. It has charm by the bucketload and off-the-wall concepts that land well in spite of themselves, but the experience is inconsistent at best and frustrating at worst. There is a good game in here somewhere, and it is great fun at points, but waiting for those points isn’t really worth it.

The finished state of Balan Wonderworld is disappointing to say the least. For all of its style, I was really interested to see how they would expand upon the preview. The aesthetic and characters are there, the music is captivating, the level design made me want to explore and experiment where I could, and the abilities mostly gave me options to do so. However, these things are held down by a lot of contrivances and outright holes in either functionality or context.

Balan Wonderworld features a range of interesting ideas that are plagued by dated mechanics. Even after losing yourself in the absurd universe, you are quickly brought back to reality due to the rigid movement and odd control scheme that oppose expectations of the genre. Although the game has a lot of charm, it does little to stand out amongst the crowd and due to this, it can be rightfully overlooked.

An interesting 3D-platformer with a very unique style and a few good ideas. But Balan feels outdated and shows some design flaws.

Balan Wonderworld deserved to be far more than average, as the final game is a marked improvement over the demo. It's beautiful a lot of the time, character designs are mostly wonderful, the unique ideas that appear in each level are great fun… however the overall execution is simply lacking something important. The repetitive bouts, rough edges, and the sometimes awful physics make this a much harder title to recommend. It is full of bubbly unique charm, and is mostly heart-warmingly fun, but many will be put off by the slow, restrictive design, despite this being designed around it. Hopefully, the game will get some traction.

Balan Wonderworld had good intentions, but it get two of its core mechanics wrong: its control and the suit system. It’s still enjoyable, although not as much as it could have been.

Your enjoyment of Balan Wonderworld is going to depend on your tolerance for primitive 3D level design. Strip away the unnecessary costumes and their poorly implemented management system — and fire those Balan’s Bouts into the sun — and you might have a nice throwback to a more experimental time of platform gaming, one that would be easier to recommend. But sadly, you can’t just strip those elements away. They're here, and they’re ruining what is otherwise an enjoyable rewind to the golden era of the mascot platformer.

The nostalgic breath is felt, and it cannot be denied that some idea, if treated in a different way, could have easily given its fruits. Yet, the new effort of Naka and Oshima collapses under the weight of a shoddy, disoriented realization, mostly unable to pay homage to the old days without being unnecessarily cumbersome.

Balan Wonderworld offers a great story, accompanied by an absolutely wonderful soundtrack. That's about all it offers, though. In the end, mediocre graphics and rough gameplay make for a rather disappointing package.

Balan Wonderworld offers some good and colorful stories for the younger gamers, but there are too many technical problems and the gameplay is far too rigid and abstruse.

Balan Wonderworld contains elements of what could have been a stellar platformer with its compelling ideas of advancement notions. However, its ineptitude with several gameplay design decisions makes it a constant struggle of unfun progression, questionable execution, and ultimately a heap of lost potential. Regardless of how much you desire to play it, I highly implore waiting for a sale because it is just not worth the full $60 price tag. Now, all I desire from the remnants of this failed title is a movie with its superb cutscene direction and animation. That is something I could get behind.

Sometimes, Balan Wonderworld evokes a bygone era of platformers very well, but this is all too fleeting a feeling. All the creativity seems to have gone into the characters and music while the actual act of platforming leaves a lot to be desired. It’s far from the worst modern platformer, but given the names involved, it’s a thoroughly underwhelming one.

Balan Wonderworld feels like a game from another time. In a different era the rough edges, inconsistent mechanics, and formulaic design may have been things that players could overlook, but in this moment in time, it's a 3D platformer of a quality that can't compete with polished modern-day contemporaries from Nintendo, Sony, and the like. It has its merits and delivers an unexpectedly mentally stimulating platformer when it manages to play to its strengths, but even a stopped clock is right twice a day.

In its best moments, Balan Wonderworld is indeed a wondrous experience, but it becomes hard to keep dreaming with its lack of depth and attention to playability.