A great stress-reliever that you wouldn’t expect. The game offers a lot of mini-bosses for you to beat with satisfying finishing moves.
Type: Single-player
Genre: Platformer, Shooter
Developer: Arkedo
Publisher: SEGA
Release date: 3 Oct, 2012
Intro
Has the stress got to you recently? Do you feel like venting it up somewhere else? Hell Yeah! Wrath of the Dead Rabbit can help you with that. It’s a side-scroller platformer game where you can fight mini-bosses and unleash amazing finishing moves to finish them off. It’s just what you’re looking for, right? Hell yeah!
Graphics
Hell Yeah! Wrath of the Dead Rabbit is filled with 2D, cartoonish characters with the addition of foggy and lighting effects. The use of both effects makes the characters look softer and blend well with the background, especially with the background that is portrayed in a more realistic style compared to the characters. Some objects still retain the same 2D look although the terrain and walls are looking more like 3D in 2D plane with the lack of black outline and the use of shadows.
Story
The story isn’t the main point of this game. Some dialogues act as fillers or tutorials and can be safely ignored if you choose to do so. The only important story is the cutscene at the beginning and end of the game, which also doesn’t mean much in the first place. Despite the meaningless story, the game doesn’t offer a skip function for the dialogues. This tends to give some trouble when you are repeating some boss fights since you have to read the same dialogues over and over again.
The Game
Gameplay
Exploring the area and killing mini-bosses are the core of this game. The game starts just like other platformer games where you have to explore the whole area to reach the boss room. Some parts of the area are locked and can only be accessible by defeating some mini-bosses, which are spread across the entire zone. Luckily, you don’t have to worry about finding them – the game has a very useful minimap to help you find whatever you want, whether it’s a healing point, the next boss location, or other important features that will be unlocked later in the game.
Although most zones have the same mechanic, some will require you to play by a certain rule. One zone requires you to clear some area without using your weapon, forcing you to either use a turret or utilize the environmental hazards to kill the mini-bosses. Some zones will also change the game into more of a shooter genre, where you control either a rocket or submarine and explore the area to defeat the remaining mini-bosses. These varying mechanics add more variety to the game and makes it not too repetitive.
Combat
The game is packed full of combat scenes, and it doesn’t disappoint. Over 100 minibosses are spread across 10 zones for you to beat, all with different attack patterns and methods to beat. Although most enemies can be defeated with your guns, some bosses are trickier to beat, requiring you to either use the environmental hazard or the new mechanic that is exclusive to that zone. However, although the game will give you some hints on how to kill these unique mini-bosses, some hints are not clear enough, causing confusion as to what to do.
Killing mini-bosses is fun and rewarding. Depleting the mini-bosses’ health will trigger a minigame which you must complete to kill the mini-boss. There is no correlation between the minigame and the mini-bosses – you need to do some ridiculous actions such as answering a silly multiple-choice question, squeezing the enemy by smashing the Space button, or the like before the killing scene kicks in. The game will show the killing scene in Danganronpa style afterward, connecting the ridiculous minigame with the killing in a hyperbolic way. Although the game has different minigames at first, the same minigame will be reused later on, reducing the satisfaction of killing them.
Three unique bosses will be spread across some zones for you to beat. These bosses are tougher than the mini-bosses and can be a bit bothersome at first, especially if you are not good at platformer games. Learning the attack patterns is vital in defeating these bosses, and if you are good at the game, you also can try to defeat them without losing any health. To be honest, defeating these bosses doesn’t feel satisfying compared to the mini-bosses since there aren’t any cool killing scenes at the end of the fight.
Missions
Three missions are available to take in each zone and finishing them will net you some rewards. The missions are usually divided into four types: killing enemies, reaching the goal, collecting coins, and performing tricks. While the first three are simple enough to beat as long as you keep on trying, the last one is not keyboard-friendly. You need to reach a high altitude and turn your analog stick to perform tricks. Due to the control scheme, it makes the “turning the analog stick clockwise” to be “pressing the WASD button in succession” on the keyboard, making the command to be harder to execute. Moreover, the instruction tends to not be clear in this regard that I couldn’t complete one mission because of this.
Length and Difficulty
I finished the game in 9h and continued playing the DLC content for 1.5h. The rest of my playtime is spent in farming the death achievement, which doesn’t take long since I already die a lot from playing the DLC content. The game was easy to beat, to the point that you just need to charge your way in most of the time to defeat the mini-bosses. There were some areas, especially the boss fights, that require some skills to beat, but that shouldn’t give you too much trouble, especially since the game provides a lot of weapon upgrades and buffs.
Problems
The game has an island feature where you can take your defeated mini-bosses and force them to work for you, giving you some in-game bonuses in return. However, I hardly got any bonuses before I finished the game and it turns out that the bonuses aren’t much use either. Moreover, it took some time and effort to assign the mini-bosses to work that it doesn’t feel rewarding to do
Specs
Intel Core i5-9300H 2.40GHz, 8GB RAM, NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1650
Verdict
To be honest, I didn’t expect much from this game, especially since it was an old game that I never heard about. However, the game turned out to be a great stress-reliever, and it works wonders with the easy-to-play and satisfying gameplay. It might have been designed to be played in short bursts, but I have finished zones after zones without realizing it. It’s all thanks to the finishing moves that show up after defeating the mini-bosses, and I couldn’t stress enough how satisfying it is to watch.
