Fluffy Puff Rampage

I'm going to start out this review by paraphrasing the great Yahtzee Croshaw, as I oft do, and throw my support behind his notion that a game that fails due to over-ambition is much preferable than a game that fails because it tried to play it safe.  Fluffy Puff Rampage strikes me as an ambitious project that eventually frustrated its creators to the point where they decided to throw up their arms and say "screw it, that'll do."

Making a game must be a lot of work, and Fluffy Puff Rampage is, I hope, proof of that.  It's riddled with design choices that strike me as "quick fixes" to problems that the devs didn't know how to fix.  "Hey, boss, I don't know why, but the save feature isn't working."  "Did you look over the code?" "yeah, I don't know what's wrong." "Alright, just create a bunch of default save files that start off the player from every conceivable angle so that the game at least has the semblance of having a save feature" "now that I can do!"

From a gameplay standpoint, Fluffy Puff Rampage is okay.  The levels are short to the point of being unsatisfying and the controls are quite sticky, especially when trying to pull off fancy combos or special moves, which all involve the use of that finicky block button.  Other than that, it's a standard 2D beat em up not quite as good as the ones that litter Newgrounds.com.

The visual style is really good...I think.  The levels are all themed really well and the enemy sprites seem to have a good bit of variety to them, but they're gone so soon after they appear that you don't really get any time to appreciate them.

Honestly, my only real gripe with this game is the whole "sticky controls" thing I grazed over.  Everything else can be looked past, but this game really is a button masher on account of the sticky controls.  Some people like that sort of thing, but I'm not a fan of button mashers.  I find them to be repetitious and dull.  Pulling off combos seems cool at first until you realize that spamming "kick" is infinitely more effective.  Dominant strategy, yo.  Were it not for that, I might have given this game my seal of approval.

That's all I got for now.  Until next time, stay aggressive

Links
The Pillow Fights Back: https://www.digipen.edu/?id=1170&proj=426