Maddening Euphoria

Genre: Platformer

Players: 1

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Review:

Maddening Euphoria is a Platformer that re-imagines the genre with its unique presentation, with simple, high-contrast visuals that look like they’re out of a night club, and with your character running on a wheel constantly churning new terrain out at you and chasing you from behind with an impending wall of death.

The presentation is really the big selling point of the game here. Despite the simple graphics, the game looks really flashy and slick, and the way the gameplay all revolves around the circular central point of the screen is definitely a unique way to present a well-trod genre.

The presentation can cause problems, though. You’re given a wealth of options for color schemes, but not all of them are conducive to the high-speed play here – in some, the contrast between the stage and hazards are minimal. You can choose the color scheme you want to use, but the default is set to random, which is a bit of a crapshoot.

The other problem here is that as you get farther from the center of the circle, the stage scales outward… inward? I’m not sure which is more accurate, but in any case, the stuff below your character scales down and out of view… which means that you’re at times confronted with a leap of faith. Gaps into bottomless pits aren’t clearly marked, and you will die in them a lot. Similarly, the circular presentation can make judging the upcoming terrain a difficult task.

It’s a pity the game’s presentation messes so much with the gameplay, because Maddening Euphoria could have been a really cool, simple Platformer. Instead, it’s a frustrating game that feels like it should be more fun than it is.

tl;dr – Maddening Euphoria is a simple Platformer with a unique presentation that’s both its best and worst quality. The game looks stylish and great, but the circular design of the game makes judging upcoming terrain difficult and creates too many blind jumps, and the colorful visuals at times makes distinguishing hazards more difficult than it needs to be. The result is a game with a lot of promise that just feels frustrating to play.

Grade: C-

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