Awesome Pea 2

A fun & challenging game.

Recommended. A retro-styled precision platformer whose double jump, per-stage soundtrack and varied backdrops improve on its predecessor, with coins doubling as route markers guiding the eye to ledges worth reaching. Twenty-five levels fall in roughly an hour and eighteen minutes, with full-coin collection per stage gating one achievement each and making it easier to fully collect than the first entry. The cave levels supply the best track, the round little protagonist's deadpan expression while deaths mount is a running joke, and the core loop of spikes, saw blades, cannon walls and bats is tight and legible throughout. No reused backdrops anywhere. The double jump tempts risky jumps that kill as often as they save, the finale repeats an earlier level with minor changes, bullets spawn from nowhere without telegraph, and saw-blade hitboxes swing from generous to unforgiving. One mid-late gauntlet demands fifteen-plus minutes of retries. Fun, frustrating and musically excellent.

thumbs up

Not as good as the first. Despite many cons, I am still glad I played it and I still got all the achievements. If I could, I'd give it a middle review but too many gripes land it as a negative. - bugs - - One of the earlier levels, 2 I think, has a pipe at the end and if you jump over it, you plummet off the edge but won't die and the game carries on as if you're alive. - Level 11 has a wall that will kill you despite having no spikes. Can easily replicate as I did it multiple times. It's the wall to the right of the gem. + pros + + Being able to do the double jump after falling from a platform. Was sorely missing in the first game. + Music. + The last 2 levels I actually liked. - cons - - Why no native d-pad support? Had to manually configure within Steam to make the d-pad act like an analogue stick. Why force the use of a 3D stick for a 2D game? - Every level looks the same. It's either a cave or factory. - You can run underneath and miss collecting the hovering coins when they're at the peak of their hover. Some sections have spikes on the roof so I have to just stop and wait. - Agreeing with another reviewer here who said the hitboxes are too large. Too many unfair …

An improvement from the first game in every single way. Awesome Pea 2 is still a basic platformer where you collect treasure and avoid dangers while navigating levels. However, Awesome Pea 2 has everything from a more clear artistic style with more fluid animations to better level layout and better controls. The game is still pretty difficult, in fact, more so than the first game, but it also manages to be a lot more fair in its difficulty, so when you lose, it feels far less frustrating. I gave the first game a reluctant thumbs up, but Awesome Pea 2 manages to more easily clear the thumbs-up bracket.

You may not like it, but this is what Pea performance looks like. Certainly more Awesome than the first game, which I remember being a decent, but janky platformer. [b]Awesome Pea 2[/b] is a bit more polished and tightly designed in comparison. It's a simple, but challenging and enjoyable platformer. The only real knock I have towards the game is that there are a few levels where the level design feels lazy, as in it's reused with few tweaks. Level 25 is the most obvious example of this, because it begins the same way as the level before it, but altered a little bit. Though I only noticed two such instances. Otherwise, the level design is quite solid, and manages to squeeze a fair amount out of the limited selection of mechanics. If you're looking for a short and challenging platformer, I can recommend [b]Awesome Pea 2[/b]. I beat all the levels and got all the treasure in just over an hour. The visuals are solid, and the music is good. A classic example of an indie platformer that is no-nonsense about its design - simple but fun.