Super Wiloo Demake Review

Super Wiloo Demake is a cutesy 8-bit action platform adventure developed by lightUP and published by Ratalaika Games. Here, you need to go rescue your dog from the evil Dr Etvaldo, who’s taken them because he is feeling lonely. This game sends you back in time with the colourful 8-bit visuals, its looping background music and its simple menu layout. It has 3 difficulties, allowing younger players or rookies a chance at completing it on the easiest setting, with a harder difficulty to entice platform veterans.

There are plenty of levels spread across the five worlds, each with their own boss, and an occasional bonus game to get your teeth into. Utilising unlockable costumes gives you a different advantage along the way. The first allowing you to take an extra hit before dying, while the second depends on the animal costume you are wearing. From being able to swim in the turtle costume, fly in the bee costume and shoot horns with the unicorn outfit (amongst others), it does help to keep the game interesting.

The enemies in SWD are not too tough to handle. The tried and tested Mario jump on their head is enough to take them down. Most move in a consistent pattern, so its simple to get past, but occasionally there’ll be some interesting challenging twists. One type of enemy will home in on you when you get close enough, which can occasionally catch you out as they can drop from above or even hide behind the scenery. The game also likes to add in extremely tight spaces, leaving very little room to jump and making the enemies harder to kill.

But for every tricky situation, there is also a costume that will curb the difficulty. For tricky small platform sections, the bee outfit can make them a breeze. For those tight spaces with enemies, mowing them down with unicorn horns deals with the situation. These costumes can be picked up during the level, or won in a bonus game, allowing you to slip one on before starting the level. The bonus level – a small game of pairs – pops up on the world screen every now and then. It calls itself a memory game, but it is more about luck as you don’t see the cards beforehand. You have 3 turns to find all the pairs, and if you find a pair you win an extra go. But you must be extremely lucky to get all the pairs; I only managed it once, mostly by chance. You can also win extra coins or outfits to help you along with the game.

The boss fights are nothing to shout about. They have very simple patterns to remember and also just require the standard jump on their head when they are vulnerable. Each different world has a different theme to keep things interesting. The first world is fairly straightforward, with no twists o surprises to get you used to the game. The second world is a winter level – which means a slippery surface to make the platforming all the trickier. There’s also narrow tunnels in the winter levels, so with the slippery surface it makes the difficulty that much tougher, and I got caught out a few times here. But, there is a handy halfway checkpoint on each stage; so if you do get tackled by the baddies, you don’t always have to go back to the start.

There are enough levels here to make it last longer than one sitting. However, they don’t vary enough, with some of the levels seem feeling quite repetitive after a while. The achievements also don’t fairly reflect the accomplishments of the game. For the hunters, you can get the full 1000G by halfway through the game. I didn’t even realise I’d gotten them – but when I noticed I didn’t get one for beating the bonus game completely or felling the end boss I thought something was off. This had the knock on effect of making collecting the 3 big coins in each level much less interesting, as they are only used to unlock the bonus games. While liberally spread out across the stages, the standard coins are also only semi-important, simply being a means to unlock a few achievements – there’s no way to spend them anywhere in the game.

Conclusion

Super Wiloo Demake is a fun platformer, primarily aimed at younger or more inexperienced players. There are enough levels, costumes and challenge to maintain some interest. But if you’re a more competent gamer, you will likely storm through the game in a few hours. Great if you’re after some easy achievements, but not so much if you’re after something to keep you going for a while.

This game was tested and reviewed on Xbox One. All of the opinions and insights here are subject to that version.