Frogun is a retro-style puzzle platformer where the central gimmick is your Yoshi-esque gun. Your gun can latch on to something at a distance and pull you towards it if the target is big or it towards you if the target is small. Small targets are then held and can be fired at something else. A lot of recent reviews have criticized the game for its controls, and I’m guessing they’re mostly talking about the gun. Although it has a targeting reticle that always shows what you’re aiming at and whether it’s in range, the two targeting modes are either too slow or too imprecise, and the auto-targeting often aims at whatever is closest even if there’s no reason to shoot that. Particularly in later levels when you need to shoot while moving, it’s often more about being consistent in your setup that having any faith in being able to aim at anything.
The good news is, you don’t actually have to use the gun for anything important very often. I did everything except the expert time trial on nearly every level and was usually able to accomplish it with just the basic jump and maybe a few gun grabs onto large targets like walls. You have unlimited lives and dying even resets the timer to whatever it was at when you reached the last checkpoint, so there aren’t really consequences for needing a few tries to learn the timing when you do need to make a more complicated jump using the gun. I won’t deny that it can be very frustrating to fail a jump a few times in a row because the gun doesn’t behave the way you’d expect it to, but it is at least consistent enough that it stops being a problem on most jumps after you get the timing down.
The other source of negative reviews is likely the last two levels. Frogun has one race level in each world, and all of them other than the one in the penultimate level are basically trivial. This level is a perfect storm of complications that suddenly make it far and away the hardest platforming sequence in the game. The race actually has a fairly tight deadline this time, but loads of traps force you to stop and wait at every turn. There are gun jumps far from checkpoints that will be extra frustrating to learn, and one sequence at the very end felt impossible to do without pausing at each platform in the jump. Beating it the first time is bad enough, but then you need to do it without dying and in a very tight timeframe if you want all the medals. The final boss is an even bigger difficulty spike with one attack pattern that feels truly impossible to reliably dodge until you notice it’s actually telegraphed by tiny little shadows a split second before. That was fine on my screen, but I can imagine those are essentially invisible on small screens or at low resolution.
So I definitely don’t begrudge anyone giving this a negative review, and I might have done the same if I hadn’t noticed the secret to that boss pattern in time or if I’d been determined to get the expert time medals. Frogun can be extremely frustrating when it doesn’t work. The good news is that it does work the great majority of the time, and the levels are a ton of fun to run through even using just your basic tools. Tracking down every coin and finding the secret items in each level both adds variety so that it’s not always just a speed platformer and it changes worlds at just the right pace to stop you from getting tired of any one setting.
All of which means that Frogun is a niche product, and probably one that doesn’t communicate its niche particularly well. You have to like platformers, but you also have to be willing to tolerate an inconsistent gimmick that will kill you unfairly sometimes. You have to like collecting everything in a level or going fast, but ideally you’ll like both. It’ll be a very short game if you only want one or the other. Provided all of that describes you, I think you’ll have a good time. It also has a sequel and a very good bundle price for both games during sales, but note that Encore is a more different game than you’d think. It has a fixed camera and a different approach to level design, so it’s not necessarily safe to say that you’ll like one just because you like the other. If you get the bundle, make sure to play both during the refund window.
Rating: 80%
Time to beat: 13 hours for around 70% completion
MSRP: $14.99
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