Bubblegum Bandit

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7/10, enjoyed the free experience. Here's some thoughts. Pros: Unique idea with the bubblegum and sticking enemies and blocks using it, (mostly) easy to understand goals, fun to use the bubblegum. Cons: Collectibles don't feel all that special & some are even in the main path, physics can get weird sometimes especially with the blocks, blocks should've been implemented earlier in the game. Overall fun experience and a good free Steam game, hope you guys make another game.

Bubblegum Bandit is one of literally thousands of retro 2D platformers infesting Steam and lowering the average quality of all video games everywhere... and I'm not kidding. Searching for "platformers" on the Steam store page yields over 17,000 results! Is this one of the best of those? Absolutely not. This platformer is driven almost completely by the gravity inversion mechanism that dozens of other platformers have already done, but much better than this. At least the paper-cutout looking "art" isn't pixelcrap. That doesn't mean it's good, though... there's reasons why this was such a failure. Platforming is an old, mostly dead genre, and this lacklustre experience, while it doesn't have an upfront cost, isn't saving the genre... it's no surprise this failed to capture any attention from gamers in the era of immersive 3D gaming. The game features really lacklustre 2D visuals (does the developer not know 3D graphics became mainstream in the mid-1990s?). Gamers don't spend thousands of dollars on gaming rigs and the latest 3D graphics cards to play 2D games. Even mobile phones and game consoles can do 3D graphics now. There's no excuse. On the matter of pricing and valu…

It's [i]VVVVVV[/i] with an admittedly cute, paper cutout aesthetic. It's also a platformer without controller support, no full screen (unless you override it with third party solutions), and is designed to be extremely obnoxious in every way conceivable, as you probably already guessed based on the video alone. Even if you addressed the input and display issues, there still would be no notable reason to play [i]iBubblegum Bandit[/i]; masochist platformers are as common as they are an effectively dead format, and for good reason—they simply aren't fun or engaging for all but a handful of people.

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I don't think there's anything that would prevent this from being playable with a controller, but there's no support. I really dislike the momentum when flipping gravity out of the wires. Movement is too slow normally to be interesting, but the game is too fast speedhacked to 2x to flip past wires effectively. Faced with no good option, this one's not worth playing.