Copperbell

Genre: Platformer

Players: 1

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Review:

Copperbell is a Platformer released on PC in 2019 and ported to Nintendo Switch in 2020. This game has players taking the role of an enchanted anthropomorphic bell sent to fight an evil that has begun festering in the land.

If there’s one element of Copperbell that stands out, it is the visual presentation, which uses some very nice hand-painted 2D graphics. The sound, on the other hand… not so much – you’ll mostly just be hearing extremely repetitive subdued instrumental music and your character’s vocalized “hup hup” whenever jumping.

For the gameplay, it feels like Copperbell was either the start of something greater that was cut short, or something aiming so low it doesn’t feel like a complete game. The platforming here is nothing special, the combat is terrible, and the enemies and locations are repetitive. There are brief moments when this game shows the potential to be something more – when you get a hint of a bit of lore, or when you gain a new ability… but those brief moments are soon brought down to Earth – the potential for worldbuilding is shattered by characters constantly just telling you “go in the tree”, “go in the cave”, “fight the spider”, and so on. Any sense of story or culture is just lost. As for the new abilities, you only ever gain one, a double-jump, along with the ability to purchase upgrades to speed, attack speed, and health. That’s it.

In a longer game, these elements might have been built on over the course of a full campaign. Alas, this is a game that can be easily completed within an hour, and as a result it never evolves past its sub-standard beginning. Yet, for this truncated and underwhelming experience, the game is priced at $7. Honestly, I wouldn’t pay $1 for this – in failing to deliver something that feels like a completed product, Copperbell has wasted my time. Don’t let it waste yours.

tl;dr – Copperbell is a Platformer that has you playing as an anthropomorphized bell. The game’s artwork is nice, but nothing else here has enough time to develop into anything more than the sub-standard and mediocre game that we’re presented with here, over in under an hour, at which point you’ll be left wondering why you spent money on this. The smart answer to that question, of course, is “I didn’t”.

Grade: D+

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