Lovely Planet review: the Super Meat Boy of first-person shooters

Very few games have you grinning like an idiot throughout your entire playthrough, and Lovely Planet is one such rare game. It’s a first-person shooter (FPS) that sports gameplay reminiscent of twitch-shooters such as Quake 3: Arena and Unreal Tournament, but encased in trippy, cartoon-like visuals.

Unlike most FPS games these days, there’s very little effort to bore you to death with a story. The entire focus of Lovely Planet is to clear level after level of colorful mayhem. You’ll be jumping from one platform to another, dodging and shooting every enemy you see, and trying to complete things in the fastest time possible. It’s lean on narrative but that doesn’t make it any less of a joy to play.

See: Wolfenstein: The New Order review: killing Nazis put a smile on my face

There are no weapons to choose from either. You start off with what’s best described as a stick that shoots purple blocks. This “semi-automatic”, as the game’s developers call it, is serviceable thanks to the game’s massive hit-boxes. Every bit of precision has been reserved for the platforming, which ends up being a brutally-fast run-and-jump affair.

Similar to Hotline Miami and Super Meat Boy, a single hit from an enemy results in you starting a level all over again. It’s a game where precision and repetition win over quick thinking. You’ll find yourself counting the number of seconds from moving before timing a jump, you’ll mentally chalk out when exactly to fire at your foes, and you’ll exhaust every single ounce of muscle memory at your disposal.

And much unlike the aforementioned games, you’ll never feel the strain of rote learning (or should I say, rote gaming) get to you. There’s very little mental strain when you fail, partly due to the game’s irreverent presentation peppered with Japanese typography, and an infectious, peppy soundtrack.

Heck, fail a level often enough and the game shouts a cheery “yay!” at you. It’s as if the game’s developer, Quicktequila, is perfectly fine with embracing my attempts at trying again and again and again. To the point where the more I failed, the more I played. Here’s a brief gameplay video:

With around a hundred levels or so, Lovely Planet is surprisingly scant on environmental variety. But with a focus on lightning fast platforming, it’s not something you’ll take note of until you’re done with it. Anyway, you’ll be too busy basking in a brightly colored world, sprinkled with hostile squares and rectangles and exploding, insta-death apples to notice. This a heady, fever dream of a game welcomes you with open arms and quirky presentation.

If you’re looking for something different from the run-of-the-mill FPS games laden with blood and gore, but yearn for the twitchy pace of shooters from a bygone era, you can’t go wrong with Lovely Planet. While I can’t guarantee that you’ll finish it, you’ll be left wide-eyed and grinning much like I did, which is more than I can say for most games out there.