When you start the game, you’ll likely be surprised by your skimpy amount of life and your crappy weapon. And when the frog runs out of life, he “enters the hospital” and has to restart from the beginning of the stage. But you can keep collecting and saving up money to go “shopping” to increase your life and carefully select powered-up weapons to take down enemies you couldn’t defeat before. The further you get, the stronger you can feel yourself becoming – and it feels good.

The characters appearing in between stages are the game’s other charm point. You’ll meet your coworker, who is a cat (for some reason), your president (also a cat), and an office lady of indeterminate species. They work like us, slog through overtime like us, complain, get chewed out, and even comfort each other, just like us.

Most of all Kero Blaster proves my fixation. Everyone that knows me, knows my gaming principles. No spoiling and great gameplay is better than having amazing graphics. It truly is a fixation of mine and Kero Blaster joins the ranks of some old time greats like BoxBoy or Sally’s world, games that prove a great idea does not need incredibly advanced graphics.

This is an incredibly fun action platformer where you are a frog that slowly needs to upgrade his weapons in order to stay alive. Literally, everything about this game screams it is a blast. Take your everyday retro style graphics, add on the frog, our hero. Equip him with a puny weapon and you are off. Give him a jump, give him the ability to shoot upwards and sideways.

Now create a basic level, you know, the style of the original Super Mario games. from left to right and add some enemies. As you go down the rabbit hole, you will encounter more and more of them as well as more intense/powerful ones. You are only stopped by your ability to stop shooting for a second, quickly turn around and start firing again. That is the best way to prevent enemies from ambushing you from behind.

Kero Blaster is not your everyday action platformer, but so much more. We have water parts, we have mud parts, … Each sporting their own physics, at one point, you are in the water and a gigantic blowfish is shooting electric currents at you. Avoid em like a true king of the water and simultaneously blast him enough to finish him off.

Throughout the entire game, the “crappy graphics” are actually the big appeal of this game. They do not distract you from the intense action of staying alive, yet they strangely contribute to the fun.

What I really loved about this game, it just never felt impossible, despite having a very hard “restart the level when you run out of lives” principle. Running back to the boss fight is usually a lot easier and as you go, more weapons are at your command. I once purposely restarted a level to try another weapon. This was just for my own enjoyment, not even meant for my review.

And it is exactly that, playing a part again because it was fun, that makes Kero Blaster so great. I forgot I was reviewing the game and I was legit having fun with it. It’s been long ago since I really had that happen to me in this genre and my personal kudos to Studio Pixel who made this game. You made a brilliant game!