Lovely Planet 2 is a sequel to the fast-flinging FPS
Bounce 'em up
Lovely Planet 2: April Skies appears to follow closely in the footsteps of its predecessor. Both original and sequel are “first person shooter gun ballets” that combine colourful-cute graphics with bounce-o-dodge platforming and lots of shooting. Replay for faster times, to find secrets you missed, or in new game plus mode for more difficult challenges. Here’s a trailer showing off the combination of cheery art and fast-paced fighting.
I have a few questions, like why exactly these houses and tomatoes are so angry, and how that island came to have a giant gun embedded in it, but the music is catchy enough to distract me.
There are actually two more earlier Lovely Planet games, because video game naming conventions are terrible and awful: the puzzlier Lovely Planet Arcade and third-person platforming spinoff Super Lovely Planet. Whether these are all the same planet or four distinct planets, each as lovely as the last, isn’t clear.
The original game also has a demo, so you can give this sort of jump-shoot fusion a try for free. Alice O played it some years ago and described it like so:
It’s a go-run-shoot-die-restart sort of a deal, where your first run sucks as you figure out the level (and perhaps identify what an enemy even does). A short while later, you know to dash forward, shoot tall wedge person, blast the block, hang a tight left, blast the homing projectile out the air and then the little house that fired it, dash through the AoE killzone that’s charging up, shoot the bomb before it hits the ground, shot the block, jump over the other block’s shot, blast it, then take a shortcut leaping off the ledge, shoot the last enemy in mid-air, and soar into the final flag. Things like that (though that’s my memory mixing levels together). And then levels get complicated.
Lovely.
Lovely Planet 2: April Skies is available on Steam, at a launch discounted sale of £5.25/$7.99/€6.55 until Tuesday 25 June.