God cannot stop me from hating this cat anymore at this point.

 

If your first 3 games are dogshit, maybe you shouldn’t have a franchise!

My Bubsy grind has continued, with me now making it to the 2nd game. I was already met with awfulness in terms of the 1st one and the Jaguar game, so I was expecting just as bad an experience here. Considering this is Bubsy, these expectations were of course, easily met, but truth be told it wasn't as bad as it could have been. It’s still bad, don’t get me wrong, but there are some slight improvements to the Bubster formula here that made it a tad more tolerable then the rest. I suppose it met the criteria of what a sequel should do, but polishing a turd doesn't change the fact that this is still a turd.

To get the improvements out the way, Bubsy does control better here. He still has the awful speed, but it’s a lot easier to stop myself and he’s no longer slipping and sliding like he’s on soap and butter with his feet. He also no longer dies in one hit, instead packing 3 hits total, meaning you won’t fall into as many traps this time, though the one hit deaths do still happen occasionally and it’s just as frustrating as it was before. That’s about it though, the rest of this game is still kind of a mess! While the three hits are appreciated, it feels like the game spams enemies a lot more often here, meaning I found myself constantly running into enemies a lot more often. A lot of my deaths in this game felt extremely cheap still because of it, and the smaller compacted level design didn’t help much with that fact. Bubsy’s falling speed has been increased a ton here as well, leading to a lot more spastic feeling gameplay, which combined with the enemy spam, led to a lot of chaos, and frankly I found myself getting overwhelmed a ton playing through this. Level design still feels sameish here with the same themes repeating each world, but 2 decides to take from the Jaguar game in terms of design, featuring these labyrinths of hell to navigate through. It’s not as bad thankfully due to the placement of signs that point you in the right direction, but I still found myself getting lost a ton, The sameish level design felt like more of a problem here too due to the wing system this game has, where you can choose which wing of a museum to visit for each run. It’s only two, the East and West, but they both feel the exact same as each other, so frankly it doesn’t really matter which you pick, it still is a miserable experience no matter what. There’s also a few minigames to stumble onto here as well and all 3 are just kinda terrible. There’s a weird frog launching one where the control over the frog feels awful, a armadillo rolling one where you move around pipes to get an extra life that just feels way too spastic for what it wants to do, and an underwater bubble collecting game that’s over before you know it, leaving virtually 0 impact on me each time I encountered it. Really, Bubsy 2 is just more of the same with some slight improvements, meaning this is still a miserable experience that I regret playing. This feels like the calm of the storm though, the final bastion of hope, as 3D is what awaits me next, and the stories I've heard of that one has me afraid to see just what I’m getting into. Here’s hoping Bubsy 3D is just a case of huge overreaction, or else I’m in for a miserable, miserable time.