Animals featuring as main characters in platformers help with the inevitable frustrations the genre creates for less skilled players. An upbeat story plus cute scenery can feel like a perfect match for a game, making FoxyLand by Ratalaika Games a must try for this reviewer. Thankfully, there is more than just eye pleasing graphics that contribute to how fun this is.
Racing to rescue a kidnapped love gives a strong sense of purpose, making the desire to overcome the few difficult parts of levels greater. The foxes are not just mere pixels on a screen. Their appealing appearance creates an attachment that smashes down walls of exasperation when parts of a level became tricky to navigate with spikes threatening to decrease the fox's life force from above, and enemies running around the other side of a bush.
The ability to temporarily stick to walls for a brief moment made it mildly easier when traversing caves, although if darts were firing simultaneously at the fox then that same brief sticking ability led to health drainage. Movement as a fox is logical with clever twists, like being able to hide behind bushes and rocks, providing a handy breathing space when sneaking past enemies.
Confession: being dive-bombed by flying enemies is highly entertaining, and resulted in the fox's health knowingly being reduced for the sheer fun of it. Anyways, there were occasions when a level's difficulty felt too easy for its position in the game, with a harder level on either side of it. At times some levels felt like they had too much empty space in them, a superficial issue that may be down to how much of the level was on screen at a time.
