You might have expected a sequel with a name like Encore to be just a small DLC that adds a few levels without really changing anything. Frogun Encore is not that. Although it is shorter than the original game, it costs only a little less and introduces significant changes to how the game plays. Rather than being like the band coming back out to play one last classic song, this is the band scheduling a separate concert and making changes to all the songs. You might still like it, and from the reviews it’s clear that plenty of people do, but it’s a significant departure from the original game.
Encore makes four big changes that lead to a bunch of smaller ones: it introduces a fixed camera, co-op gameplay, gives bosses a health bar instead of always having them take four hits, and seems to compress the time trial and expert time trial medals into just the expert medal. I’m not convinced that any of these are good ideas. Starting with the most innocuous, co-op just doesn’t really add anything. The levels are still only designed with one play in mind and I never saw anything in particular that would be more fun with a friend, but they had to make the changes to the camera and bosses to accommodate two players. The boss change is also not a major step down, but it does mean that the bosses generally have less interesting patterns since they have to keep coming back to attacks that give you loads of projectiles to shoot at them.
The camera and medal changes, meanwhile, are what ruined this game for me. Getting every medal on a level is now an exercise in frustration that requires finding skips and playing perfectly, but the fixed camera makes looking for skips far harder than in the first game and often gets in the way of being able to line up jumps. Camera angles often seem to have been chosen based on what looks cool rather than what is actually ideal for playing the game, and there are numerous instances where you’ll end up falling out of the level because the camera made a gap look like solid ground. As if that’s not bad enough, the camera also actively gets in the way of being able to find all the coins and secrets in a level, making those medals more difficult to get without making them any more interesting. Now you have to tediously crawl through the level looking for coins on the edge of what the camera will show instead of just spinning the camera around to see everything quickly.
There’s really no coming back from those problems, but even so Encore isn’t quite all downsides. I’m sure co-op is fun. Even though the bosses are mostly just the same guy in different vehicles over and over again, you at least get a much greater variety of level decor and enemies along the way. There are even optional levels for players who want more. Double jumps and new types of switches add variety to your movement and the puzzles, and the game has wisely avoided relying as much on precise midair gun grabs. All of this is good, but none of it comes close to making up for the frustration of missing a jump because the camera refuses to be at a useful angle.
I expected Encore to be an easy recommendation because it would have been so simple to just create more of what the first game did. It’s great that the dev was brave enough to try something new with the sequel, but the result is a game that is a big step down in all the most important ways. If you’re going to change a platformer to having a fixed camera, you have to be sure that you’re always choosing the best angle for every jump and not just trying to show off your scenery. Encore fails miserably at that basic requirement and nothing else it does can begin to make up for that. It’s one thing to miss a jump in a 90s platformer when everyone was just learning 3D and didn’t know better or in an indie game that might not have had the resources to do a free camera, but Encore doesn’t have those excuses because they already made this game with a camera that worked. It’s extremely cheap if purchased as a bundle with the first game during a sale, so it might still be worth trying to see what you think, but I can’t recommend it at all.
Rating: 45%
Time to beat: About 2 hours after I decided to forget the medals and just rush through
MSRP: $13
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