OVERALL
Fun, but feels unfinished. Like is so often true with the series that inspired Spark, this one could have done with another year in the oven. The stages are cool and interesting, the music is really good (even when it re-uses tracks from the first game), and Fark's controls feel very smooth and satisfying. It plays more like a proof of concept or demo than a full game, so I'd recommend picking it up on sale.

PROS
The game looks very good and feels good to run around in. The levels are pretty huge and very interesting, though unfortunately there's not a ton of reason to explore them. The animations are really excellent, and the boss fights are fairly cool to look at even if you end up fighting them all in basically the same way. The final boss, in particular, is very visually exciting.

The music, too, is really well done. The stage music is catchy and fun, and I'll probably be adding some of the tracks to my playlists. The boss themes are different from the stage themes in that they have vocals and have a more organic feel. They really manage to evoke a certain other series' iconic music style while also having their own personality. Unfortunate, then, that there isn't enough music for all of the stages and bosses to have unique tracks, and several stages re-use tracks from the first game completely unchanged. If this were put out under a publisher I'd say they ran out of time, but it's self-produced so the lack of a fully fleshed out soundtrack is a bit confusing.

CONS
The places it falls down are in the story and the combat variety. The story is thrown at you in sudden bursts and many times it feels like you've missed large chunks of it and the characters feel both flat and incomplete. E.J, for example, is clearly supposed to have some sort of impish rival to tragically used fool story, but you never actually see that arc. He just shows up a few times, gets clowned on (heh), and then dies near the end after undergoing a revelation that mean pretty much nothing to the audience. It's very sad that we didn't get to see what the story wanted us to. All of the characters end up with this same problem to varying degrees.

On the combat variety side, while the controls for combat feel good, there's practically no variety to them and they feel much simpler than the fist game. Outside of boss battles there's pretty much no reason to fight enemies other than getting points, and the only thing points get you is medals which eventually let you buy Fark's super form to play in levels. By that point, though, you've already mastered all the levels so why bother? The fighting, when you do need to do it, is pretty much just mashing the attack button and holding block whenever an enemy winds up their strikes, meaning that aside from memorizing certain attack patterns of bosses there's not a lot of room for interesting gameplay. In addition, the power-ups are so simplified, in fact, that I don't actually know if the different forms you can pick up are anything other than cosmetic changes. They all control and animate exactly the same. This makes the fact that you can buy these power-ups with the BITs you pick up in levels kinda funny, in a sad way. On the bright side, Edgy Fark has a certain black hedgehog's jet shoes and actually has a different run animation for them, which is really cool.

OVERALL Fun, but feels unfinished. Like is so often true with the series that inspired Spark, this one could have done with another year in the oven. The stages are cool and interesting, the music is really good (even when it re-uses tracks from the first game), and Fark's controls feel very smooth and satisfying. It plays more like a proof of concept or demo than a full game, so I'd recommend picking it up on sale. PROS The game looks very good and feels good to run around in. The levels are pretty huge and very interesting, though unfortunately there's not a ton of reason to explore them. The animations are really excellent, and the boss fights are fairly cool to look at even if you end up fighting them all in basically the same way. The final boss, in particular, is very visually exciting. The music, too, is really well done. The stage music is catchy and fun, and I'll probably be adding some of the tracks to my playlists. The boss themes are different from the stage themes in that they have vocals and have a more organic feel. They really manage to evoke a certain other series' iconic music style while also having their own personality. Unfortunate, then, that there isn't enough music for all of the stages and bosses to have unique tracks, and several stages re-use tracks from the first game completely unchanged. If this were put out under a publisher I'd say they ran out of time, but it's self-produced so the lack of a fully fleshed out soundtrack is a bit confusing. CONS The places it falls down are in the story and the combat variety. The story is thrown at you in sudden bursts and many times it feels like you've missed large chunks of it and the characters feel both flat and incomplete. E.J, for example, is clearly supposed to have some sort of impish rival to tragically used fool story, but you never actually see that arc. He just shows up a few times, gets clowned on (heh), and then dies near the end after undergoing a revelation that mean pretty much nothing to the audience. It's very sad that we didn't get to see what the story wanted us to. All of the characters end up with this same problem to varying degrees. On the combat variety side, while the controls for combat feel good, there's practically no variety to them and they feel much simpler than the fist game. Outside of boss battles there's pretty much no reason to fight enemies other than getting points, and the only thing points get you is medals which eventually let you buy Fark's super form to play in levels. By that point, though, you've already mastered all the levels so why bother? The fighting, when you do need to do it, is pretty much just mashing the attack button and holding block whenever an enemy winds up their strikes, meaning that aside from memorizing certain attack patterns of bosses there's not a lot of room for interesting gameplay. In addition, the power-ups are so simplified, in fact, that I don't actually know if the different forms you can pick up are anything other than cosmetic changes. They all control and animate exactly the same. This makes the fact that you can buy these power-ups with the BITs you pick up in levels kinda funny, in a sad way. On the bright side, Edgy Fark has a certain black hedgehog's jet shoes and actually has a different run animation for them, which is really cool.