MosaicMario
Possessed User Title
After watching the fith part of Adventures I took a look at the Steam page and sure enough the Encore DLC was released for 5€. I bought it and played and finished Encore Mode. This Mode is pretty awesome for many reasons.
Not only do the stages have different color palettes the stages themselves have lots of minor tweaks making them slightly harder and feel different. Either that or I just got rusty. The special stages themselves are definitely harder but if you know what you are doing you'll probably beat most of them on first or second try. Switching between the two active characters gives a good variety of options and dying just autoswitches you to the next character instead of restarting from the last checkpoint making the gameplay actually feel less disruptive but also more punishing. Due to the fact that you can only have 5 lives max you can also gain continues in Special Stages, though I never had to use one. Encore Mode is definitely a nice addition and a good change of pace after having played lots of Mania Mode.
Time Attack has also been updated, now you can save replay videos and watch or challenge them (kinda like in SRB2). You can even time trial the encore variants of all stages. However, I am a bit disappointed that you can't play encore variants of the stages in the new competition mode.
The two new characters... I haven't played much as Mighty but oh boy, I'm having way more fun playing as Ray than I should have. Soaring through the air, reaching higher places and gaining speed is lots of fun and I could do that the whole day. It feels like Cape Mario in some way and I ended up playing as him the majority of my Encore Mode playthrough.
The game also got some neat upgrades here and there, all minor like the characters moving their pupils into the direction they're sliding in a solid frozen block in PGZ2 or adding the missing cutscenes which thank god are also now skipable.
Performance wise I had little to no problems. The game crashed once but thats because Steam Beta screwed up and just destroyed itself somehow and also the Music sometimes doesn't go back to full volume after a 1up jingle. I also found a bug in Competition mode similar to my first ever post on this board and my first ever bug report: You have no invincibility uppon respawn and thus you can die the frame you spawn. Why do I keep finding those silly bugs?
Overall I'd say the 5€/USD/whatever are worth the upgrade, both characters as well as Encore Mode esp. add lots of replayability and I still need to sacrifice two of my perfect 99 Lives, 7 Emeralds savegames for Mighty and Ray. I will try to get my hands on a physical release of this game if possible and once I got my hands on a Nintendo Switch.
Edit: I forgot to mention that you now can set game options such as debug mode, sonic ability or & Knuckles mode in savegames as well, it is no longer limited to the no save slot. A welcome change.
Not only do the stages have different color palettes the stages themselves have lots of minor tweaks making them slightly harder and feel different. Either that or I just got rusty. The special stages themselves are definitely harder but if you know what you are doing you'll probably beat most of them on first or second try. Switching between the two active characters gives a good variety of options and dying just autoswitches you to the next character instead of restarting from the last checkpoint making the gameplay actually feel less disruptive but also more punishing. Due to the fact that you can only have 5 lives max you can also gain continues in Special Stages, though I never had to use one. Encore Mode is definitely a nice addition and a good change of pace after having played lots of Mania Mode.
Time Attack has also been updated, now you can save replay videos and watch or challenge them (kinda like in SRB2). You can even time trial the encore variants of all stages. However, I am a bit disappointed that you can't play encore variants of the stages in the new competition mode.
The two new characters... I haven't played much as Mighty but oh boy, I'm having way more fun playing as Ray than I should have. Soaring through the air, reaching higher places and gaining speed is lots of fun and I could do that the whole day. It feels like Cape Mario in some way and I ended up playing as him the majority of my Encore Mode playthrough.
The game also got some neat upgrades here and there, all minor like the characters moving their pupils into the direction they're sliding in a solid frozen block in PGZ2 or adding the missing cutscenes which thank god are also now skipable.
Performance wise I had little to no problems. The game crashed once but thats because Steam Beta screwed up and just destroyed itself somehow and also the Music sometimes doesn't go back to full volume after a 1up jingle. I also found a bug in Competition mode similar to my first ever post on this board and my first ever bug report: You have no invincibility uppon respawn and thus you can die the frame you spawn. Why do I keep finding those silly bugs?
Overall I'd say the 5€/USD/whatever are worth the upgrade, both characters as well as Encore Mode esp. add lots of replayability and I still need to sacrifice two of my perfect 99 Lives, 7 Emeralds savegames for Mighty and Ray. I will try to get my hands on a physical release of this game if possible and once I got my hands on a Nintendo Switch.
Edit: I forgot to mention that you now can set game options such as debug mode, sonic ability or & Knuckles mode in savegames as well, it is no longer limited to the no save slot. A welcome change.
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