Verging on a Mario Walking Simulator
I’ve got a Super Mario Rule with budget indie platfomers. If there are more ideas in a single level of a Super Mario game than in the entirety of that platformer, it’s not doing enough. Alex the Rabbit, if you were to pile up all of its ideas, would not get close to passing the Super Mario rule. It wouldn’t get halfway up the flagpole.
Alex the Rabbit is definitely an endearing game, don’t get us wrong. More games should have a main character that is clearly a human cosplaying as an animal. The next Crash Bandicoot would be a hoot if it was a dude in a bandicoot onesie.
Sonic the Guy in a Hedgehog Suit
The backgrounds are neatly detailed too, and there’s a chunky colourfulness to the levels that feels dropped from platforming’s golden era on the NES or Amiga. The enemies are a ragtag bunch, with some familiar faces – vampire bats are a platforming guarantee – and some not so familiar, like grubs.
Alex the Rabbit himself does not have a huge number of moves. He can jump, run, crouch and bottom-bounce enemies. But while these are all staples for this kind of game, they are also slightly unorthodox in terms of their execution. And that’s unorthodox in a bad way rather than good.
Alex is burdened with a stamina bar. That stamina bar can be refilled with – what seem to be – chocolate bars. But the fact there is a stamina bar at all means you are capped on how often you can use the run button, which is definitely a choice.
Throttling the Best Part of the Game
We can see why the bar is there, because the run button feels amazing. It almost triples the height and length of Alex’s jump, making precise platforming sections an absolute breeze. You can effectively bypass chunks of the level, and we leaned on it. There’s even after-touch, so you can correct any over-jumps. But adding a stamina bar means that you can lose speed halfway through and plunge to your death. And those moments without stamina and the run button feel bad as a result. Alex the Rabbit slows to a trudge, making it a game that only feels satisfying in bursts.
The crouch function is similarly odd. Alex is required to duck and crawl for long sections of levels, but it is the slowest crawl we have ever seen in a game (no hyperbole). Alex may as well have a zimmer frame. Nothing can attack you in these sequences, and the crawls are often long, so you just spend a couple of minutes waiting for Alex. to. finally. finish.
There’s a long line of these idiosyncratic but unsuccessful changes to platforming wisdom. Pressing B on the pause screen causes you to reset back to the main menu, losing all progress. An ice level has no slipperiness to it, and acts like a normal level. Enemies toss themselves off platforms.
There are bosses in Alex the Rabbit, but they’re not interested in the player at all. They just wander about, doing their thing, and the player needs to jump on them. A passive approach isn’t necessarily unusual for a boss, but they’re coupled with a rock-bottom level of challenge. They effectively invite you to jump on them. We felt cruel killing them, like we were putting them down.
Better as a Kids’ Game?
The bosses made us wonder if Alex the Rabbit was designed for children, and there may be truth in that. The first three worlds of the game are completely benign, offering almost no challenge and very little in the way of level complexity. The most you’ll need to navigate is moving platforms.
But our kids found it all too benign. Aside from one level, the player only progresses onward. Enemies mostly move backwards and forwards, only really getting interesting after the player has jumped on them. There are no collectibles, no puzzles, and no special rules for each level. The beach levels don’t have water sections, for example. To call it vanilla is slightly unfair to a rather underrated flavour.
That all changes with a final horror-themed world that is a real difficulty spike. Suddenly, you have to pay attention, as bats lurch at you and enemies cluster around tighter platforming sequences. It was, very abruptly, more than our kids could handle, which debunked the ‘for the kids’ theory.
Gnawing Away
As you can probably tell from my grumpy tone, Alex the Rabbit wasn’t a big hit in our house. While we appreciated the Mario-like presentation, it was sorely lacking some important elements. It didn’t offer any challenge for three out of its four worlds, and it didn’t offer any innovation to replace it. It was a mindless romp through colourful worlds, and we knew – as we played – that we were going to have no memory of it once it finished.
It very much did not pass the Mario Rule.
Important Links
Hop, Dodge And Conquer – Alex the Rabbit Is On Xbox – https://www.thexboxhub.com/hop-dodge-and-conquer-alex-the-rabbit-is-on-xbox/
Buy from the Xbox Store, Optimised for Series X|S – https://www.xbox.com/en-GB/games/store/alex-the-rabbit-xbox-series/9P9BG24ZXZ42/0010
Buy for Xbox One – https://www.xbox.com/en-GB/games/store/alex-the-rabbit/9NQX5H160BG2/0010
Want a PC drop? – https://www.xbox.com/en-GB/games/store/alex-the-rabbit-windows/9NX9HKLRW49L/0010
