Seneste anmeldelser af Rotanim

A crust made from greasy 1990-2005 cartoons. Ren and Stimpy and/or Ed, Edd n Eddy Artstyle, sound design and expressions.

+ Everything about the characters is charmingly over the top and silly, to the point where 10% of the UI is dedicated to a TV showing slapstick animations of what your character is currently feeling. Yes, the enemies all have unique expressions, designs and visible personalities too.

- However, the setpieces are invertly comparably simple most of the time. The dull geometry will neither tell many stories like other popular platformers often do. The characters are the sole main focus of the presentation, and the levels serve as a picture frame allowing them to feel "alive". This chef is all about the flavour, not customer service.

Tomato sauce produced with Donkey Kong Country quality levels of level structure variety, speedrunning potentional and player challenge.

+ Almost every obstacle in the game is designed to allow clever, brave and/or expert players to pass them with top speed in mind 90% of the time. This despite the game's fairly unique verticality and mixture of enclosed vs. open spaces. There's plenty of secrets on every level too, making exploration rewarding especially the first time(s) you go through a new level. Even so, the secrets are ALSO placed in a way to support your perfectionist speedrunning antics, and are placed in a way to allow speedy access despite taking the detour to get them. There is even an extra rank for completing a level and all its secrets in one, unexpired combo of ramming through enemies and picking collectibles; further embellishing the very intentional design for potentional speedrunning.


- I found the deisgn quite centered on enjoying the fast-paced playstyle. SO. Here's where your enjoyment of this serving is likely to be decided. Depending on if you're satisfied with the label "tomato" or if cultivars with fine, nuanced flavours that demand your attention are delectable enough to care. If it's the former then you'll likely be disinterested to finish the dish after the very first level (my friends who are less into platformer pizzas and more into combat hamburgers did this), frustrated at the spicyness of the game's later challenges and/or dissappointed with the meal's size after quickly finishing it without having savoured the flavour. The later worlds do add more unique visual designs and gimmicks, but too little, too late for the already disillusioned food critic I reckon.

If it's the latter, you'll be delighted to find that the ingredients have all been placed to give you a tasting experience where varied and repeat bites can yield different and often delicious results. The first world's levels are quite simple in scope, even graceless (even more so than world 1 of the otherwise impeccably stellar DKC: Tropical Freeze) at first glance. This however, along with several gameplay sections, encourages the player to explore the moveset and embrace the focus on momentum, to really make the otherwise dull parts shine in their own way.



Finally, adorned with toppings consisting of Wario Land's moveset, myriad ridiculous transformations/gameplay alterations, collectathon-like scoring, and WL4/WL Shake Dimension style speed sections.

+ Just like the character presentation is over the top, so is the main character's moveset. There's the standard jump, run and attack/grab. Sure. But then you realize during the tutorial that you can defy that old coot Newton's silly fantasies of laws in physics in every desirable fashion. Your "throws" after grabbing launch enemies on an infinite horizontal axis with the player character having the silliest animations (as well as unique ones for bosses) possible, breaking any other's bones and/or fragile walls in their path. You can perform an inifintely vertical super jump after gaining momentum, which you can also horizontally launch yourself out of mid-jump. Your ground pound can flatten anything (except the already-flat ground, it does not require the flattening) and cause an earthquake, both given enough momentum.

Most notably however, your legs are powered with SHEER ITALIAN RAGE AND OBSTINATE CULINARY PRIDE making you reach ridiculous levels of speed; Running up and jumping between walls, turning with a satisfying "drift" delay that also keeps you at current or second top speed, ramming into almost every obstructive enemy in the game after paralyzing with the sheer terror of seeing a rabid grease-covered psych-ward case approaching them head-first at mach 3. Not only this, but you can use your standard grab attack and/or slide to reach this speed much faster as well as utilize the haymaker move after grabbing an enemy midair to make your jump horizontally fast and floaty somehow (still haven't figured this one out). Oh, and your taunt is a parry as well as a super attack that is charged by combos.

The transformations are similarly ridiculous. One level you'll be smashing through a keep in invincible but bulky knight suits, sending you coasting uncontrollably forward through the place the moment you hit a slope. The other level you'll be assaulted by spicy food projectiles that turn you into a fire breathing explosive hazard, blowing up structures by stumbling into TNT (with your face) while avoiding the wrath of unfortunately situated cows.

It all comes together with the addition of the collectables, enemy kill combos and the escape sections. Your scoring is majorly decided by your ability to pick up collectables during your rampage throughout the levels. Most, including the KONG-letter/Yoshi Coin-like toppins that let you progress the game, are placed on the main path to and from the level's start and end. A few big score-contributors however, are found in the 3 secret mini-level areas in every level, only attainable during the escape sequence and/or behind secret walls which are often found and only broken through by speeding through the accompanying section. All collectibles also contribute to extending the timer your kill combo which also adds to your score upon finishing said combo(s). Finally, when you reach the end of a level you trigger the escape sequence, potentionally altering the level layout, making enemies (re-)spawn in many locations (hopefully adding to your combo score) on your way out and very slowly sapping at your score as you go for the exit. Some collectables or even secrets can only be found during this time, adding some hefty risk vs. reward for the perfectionists.

- Yet again, doing well in this game is fairly centered on being able to do things quickly. Additionally, scoring and collectibles are fairly arbitrary for those not looking to replay the levels and see how they can improve. Finally, some secrets can be frustratingly hard to find at all or complete while keeping your combo intact; both quite annoying for the completionist player.



If you're hungry for a platformer that wants you to master a moveset, sink your teeth into a level until the next one makes you rethink what is possible and swallow your pride as some section flavours humble you; this is worth the full menu price and tips on top.

However, if you're the type of person that wants a fast-food new super mario bros.-style platformer where the game's presentation, accessibility and replaying for collectibles alone lulls you in then Pizza Tower('s pizza) can ironically be considered an aquired taste.

All in all, Have A Nice Death is a marvel of a action platformer, one which any fan of said genre should not miss. I will update this review as I get the time and with future game updates, but I will leave you with this: Have you ever asked yourself: What if Hades and Hollow Knight had a baby? Worry not, for the answer is lying Dead ahead of you.

Have A Nice Death (HAND) is a beautifully hand-drawn Roguelite action platformer teeming with humour, character, charm but most importantly: fluidity. I could ramble over how besotted I am with the animation and environment quality of the game for several paragraphs alone. More importantly, here are my impressions and compliments from playing the game.

Death's moveset is silky-smooth and every move can be chained into another: You can string together a scythe combo, dash, spell, alternate attack, upward and downward movement all in the span of 2 seconds. When you start mastering your movement and start recognizing enemy movements, the sky is the limit for how brazenly you can play; chaining together every attack and dodge/dash in a beautiful balette of Death (himself).

Oh, did I mention that your primary weapon has multiple forms with different movesets? Yeah, well, your secondary/alternate weapons most often have several moves too by holding up/down and/or by being in mid-air. To top it all off, EVERY primary, alternate weapon and spell have their own unique Super attack triggered by filling a meter which you charge up faster by mixing up your attacks with different moves and/or weapons.

It's crazy.


Combat is fast-paced and hectic, especially when encountering arenas ("minion hordes") and bosses. If you're unfamiliar with action platformers it's easy to get overwhelmed at first: You will most likely die a fair couple times until you start seeing progress. However, every enemy attack has a visual tell, and said attacks (wherever applicable) vary depending on distance to the player. Practice and knowledge allows you to outmaneuver even the hardest of boss patterns. Combine this with the fact that your primary attacks stun most smaller enemies in a couple hits, and you have a fantastic combat flow potentional where hyper-aggressiveness is heavily rewarded when executed properly. Additionally, charged attacks and heavier alternate weapons (aquired randomly and by choice every run) have the capacity to even easily build up to stunning bosses if you pile enough attacks on them.

That being said, the game is not easy by any means. Each enemy has their own, unique attack(s). Hordes and bosses will always keep you on your toes unless you have aquired a particularly broken build, and even then you can easily die if you aren't careful. Speaking of which...



Let me start this off by stating the following: The game is perfectly fair in all the challenges it presents, but balance-wise it is not perfect in its current state. It is definitely is a work in progress and the developers are perfectly aware of these problems. Some weapons/builds underperform without certain upgrades, others overperform with certain upgrades to the point of nullifying a lot of the challenges the game has to offer. This problem is further exacerbated by weapons+upgrades being somewhat RNG and the fact that basic enemies gain a flat damage reduction at higher difficulty settnings once every world, resulting in chip-damage weapons doing zero damage on later worlds/departments in a run without the proper upgrades. You need to complete the game multiple times for you to reach this level of difficulty settning, however.

Additionally, to the player's advantage you have plenty of influence over the RNG in question: You can choose the primary reward for every level/floor you play, in every world. Be it extra currency, guaranteed drops for a weapon and/or spell, guaranteed stat upgrades, ability upgrades/additions, shops (which may include healing, stats upgrades, abilities and weapons), forges(where you upgrade your equipment) as well as mixes with random but often multiple rewards or levels with more enemies that have increased chances of dropping pickups.

About upgrading abilities, or "curses". This is where you choose how to build your character every run, the curse system has three different ability upgrade trees where each upgrade type on every step of said upgrade tree is random but predictable and influenceable with clear power progression. The more curses you pick for a single upgrade tree, the more powerful the curses for that tree offered to you become. The trees are primarily focused on weapon damage, utility/economy/defense and spell useage+damage respectively, but may grant abilities that heavily benefit the player by mixing things up.


A full run usually lasts 1-2 hours in the games current state. Which, for being a roguelite is perfectly fine in my opinion. It really feels like the game respects your time. Speaking of respecting your time, every run is a fresh start with new possibilties. As previously mentioned, there are no permanent upgrades which carry over runs. But there are unlocks. New weapons, spells, food items (boosts offered to you after every boss fight), risk vs. reward challenges/"contracts" and stacking difficulty settnings hades-style.

The one area where game noticeably lacks in content is that the amount of different room layouts available is rather limited. The excellent moveset and varying playstyles provided by the arsenal of alternate attacks available makes up for this however.

It took me 35 hours to reach and beat the highest difficulty of the game with the current content available as of writing this review. And I had a blast all the way through. I still have a select few unlocks to go, and will keep on playing experimenting with builds and challenging myself to different playstyles. The promise of future worlds, items and content throughout early access and hopefully further on will only add to this playtime further still.

I've only owned Sam for a couple hours. But if anything were to happen to her, I'd have everyone board charon and then do it myself.

Surely the developers didn't think making the game require an Epic Games account would end well, right? Well, nobody is happy right now and there's blood all over the carpet. Clean this mess up, Mediatonic.

The most (or quite possibly least) fun you can have with friends online.

Meet your match update simulator. This game could have been (and was) so much more.