Welcome to our review of A Hole New World, a very challenging new game on Nintendo Switch!
The city is being invaded by monsters from the Upside Down World! You, the Potion Master, must defeat evil all alone, with no tutorials or “Easy Mode” to assist you. You’ll have to rely on the help of Fäy, your companion fairy, and your potions!
Jump and shoot like they did in the good ol’ arcade days. Fight enemies in your world and in the Upside Down World! Defeat gigantic bosses and acquire their powers!
Story Mode with five different worlds, Game+, Boss Rush Mode, Challenge Mode and multiple endings!
More than 30 different enemies, 7 boss battles and lots of secret characters to discover!
What this game brings to the table, is basically nothing new. We have all played this kind of game, possibly multiple times already! So what is so special about this one that you have to try it out? Just about everything!
When you play A Hole New World, you are facing your every day difficult platformer, the Nintendo Switch has several of them, but a Hole New world introduces the entirely new approach of playing upside down in the upside down world, which really adds to the fun but also the difficulty. At times, you need to choose which way to go, regular world or upside down. It is very challenging to instantly switch between both playing styles as you jump “downwards” on your Nintendo Switch screen.
The bosses are very hard, but perseverance is the key and just keep going! I only beat some of the earlier bosses after at least 10 tries! But how the game is made, you just want to keep going. The game concept just keeps pushing you to try harder. Another great point, the save points in the game are pretty much placed perfectly.
After you finally beat a boss, you get new powers, powers that you obviously need to finish off the next one. The entire game just has this massive flow of difficult parts but you just hit an automatic pilot and keep going at it. In the game, there are parts where you just feel like giving up, but just don’t. At one point, the ground I was walking on, it was rough and I could not walk properly, let alone run, I was hit by a barrage of enemies. Being unable to really run away, I had to become real inventive and eventually, I succeeded. I got a high out of that little success.
What should be mentioned, as you jump through to the other side, you are always performing a specific jump into the new side, if you, however, make it so you do not land on solid ground, it becomes real comical to see how it keeps flipping you from side to side.
In conclusion, I loved A Hole New World. It is hard but not impossible. It is classically styled, but not too retro. It is just rightly balanced! I loved the new approach to both worlds being perfectly entwined. Would I change something if I could? Probably not, I think the game is pretty much amazing as is. I love how they got the speedrunners covered too. All in All, this game is a near perfect yet very challenging iteration of a genre!
My rating stands at 90%
