Bruxa

Genre: Platformer

Players: 1

.

Review:

(Note: This game is included in also in 10 in 1 Games Bundle, along with .cat, .cat Milk, Cats Puzzle, Chubby Cat, Fly Cat, Him & Her 3, Rafa’s World, Rô, and Scrap Bolts. Additionally, it is included in Family Vacation Bundle / 20 Games, along with .cat Milk, American Man, Axolotl, CatCat, Cats Puzzle, Cooking Craze, Dinogotchi, Fire Race, Hidden Theft, Home Sweet Home, Kitten Island, Last Mage Survivors, Nincat, Rafa’s World, Rô, Scrap Bolts, Scribbled, Submarine Bubble, and The Great Battle of Shark Monkey Squirrel Dinossaur Bird Bee.)

Bruxa, released on Nintendo Switch in 2023, is a Platformer that puts players in the role of a young woman with a witch’s hat and magical powers who must fight her way through giant bugs and other enemies in a vaguely fantasy-themed world.

Bruja’s presentation uses mostly-decent retro-style 2D pixel art visuals accompanied by an extremely forgettable chiptune soundtrack. It’s all fine if a bit unspectacular, although I do think that background and foreground elements sometimes blend together, and the game repeatedly has issues with some extremely nasty slowdown, despite the absence of anything impressive on-screen that would cause such a thing.

When it comes to the gameplay, this is a pretty by-the-numbers Platformer. Jump on enemies or attack them with your magic wand melee attack, and jump from platform to platform to reach the end of each level. At times the level design seems pretty good, and at times it seems pretty bad, so in the end it balances out to something mediocre.

The problem is that the gameplay here is just far too unpolished. Jumping near ceilings sometimes glitches you into another part of the level, platforms that rise and lower will sometimes cause you to hop in place as the game tries to decide whether you’re touching the ground, and hit detection is an absolute crapshoot. And when you die, you always get thrown back all the way to the beginning of the (sometimes quite long) level.

Without these problems, Bruxa would be a completely forgettable and uninteresting Platformer. However, with these problems this becomes extremely frustrating. Then slap on a $10 price tag (surely to make the $2 discount price seem like a bargain) and you have a game that simply is not worth bothering with. Don’t buy this game.

tl;dr – Bruxa is a Platformer where players take the role of a young witch jumping on platforms and fighting bugs. The core gameplay here is bland and mediocre, but it’s made far worse due to unpolished game design and poor hit detection. Add to this an absurd $10 price and you have a game that’s absolutely not worth bothering with.

Grade: D+

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