Reviews

• gamedeal user

  Feb 11, 2022

  I've 100%ed Grapple Dog and I'm 1000% ready for more! Grapple Dog is incredible. I can't peel my eyes away from its gorgeous pixel art and animation, I'm bopping along with its great (if limited) soundtrack, and the controller is completely disappearing in my hands with how great everything feels to play. I am the good grappling boy. The gameplay variety is spot on with great bonus stages and a constant introduction of fun new mechanics, and I'm very pleasantly surprised to say that even the writing has me smiling. Grapple Dog will be one of my favorite platformers full stop, and it will likely be my favorite game to release this year. Some tiny little things: - 60fps lock, but something weird's going on with that lock if I alt+tab. Easily fixed with alt+enter. - Collectibles do not save if you exit the level from pause. This is more a pet peeve than anything, but some of the presentation makes it unclear whether or not they will save. - When falling in a pit, you respawn and are able to move nearly immediately without even having touched the ground. This lead to me walking off the cliff again multiple times. That's probably just my problem, but you also don't spawn with collision invincibility, so if there's an enemy there, you might unwittingly bounce off them into the pit. - Some boss fights are too easy and/or too long, and do not have mid-fight checkpoints. - My play time is off by 90mins or so, just an FYI. - Not enough people are playing Grapple Dog. Play Grapple Dog. 10 doggo pats out of 10.
• gamedeal user

  Feb 11, 2022

  Grapple Dog is an amazing game; the amount of care and polish really shines. This game is beautiful to look at and even better to play, with solid controls. The level design is the best part, in my opinion, and I really can't wait to get through all of it. Definitely recommend for anyone looking for an excellent platformer!
• gamedeal user

  Feb 11, 2022

  You can pet the dog.
• gamedeal user

  Feb 11, 2022

  Grapple Dog is a real love letter to GBA era mascot platformers, and it's fantastic. The controls are snappy, the sound effects and music are amazing, and the pixel art is bright and gorgeous. The game has some surprising challenge too!
• gamedeal user

  Feb 11, 2022

  This game is so damn great. The level design and player movement are both top notch, as is the lovely pixel art and tunes. There are so many nice little details everywhere, so much love has been put into the making this game. It does a stellar job of being very playable from the get go while also having a very high skill ceiling for those that wanna git gud. Dog go zoom. Really excited to see where speedrunners are with this game in 6 months time! A few minor gripes: -mid air movement is hard to control, often zig zag left and right when I'm just trying to stop horizontal movement -you stick to walls for too long and when you do release, too much horizontal speed (related to above point). That said, dashing down when wall-sliding is a nice touch and alleviates a lot of of these headaches -if you miss a purple gem, you have to complete the whole level again when collecting it (the levels are really good, but they are big!!) None of these points get anywhere close to ruining this fantastic game though. I really recommend Grapple Dog, whether you're out for a fun & lighthearted experience or want to challenge yourself with time trials and getting every collectable. Goodest boy, would pat again
• gamedeal user

  Feb 14, 2022

  This is a super fun platformer that hits all the right notes. Levels are long and challenging, and there's plenty of secrets and things to collect. I love the overworld map where the game has you travelling from island to island in a little poloygonal boat. Very cute! The game combines various mechanics well. It's bright and colorful. Definitely a worthy purchase!
• gamedeal user

  Feb 14, 2022

  not really polished enough to support the level of difficulty it winds up attempting to tackle in the back half which is a shame since this probably could've been passable otherwise other nitpicks: - having one song per world is not enough like at all there is a desperate need to vary tracks with more frequency, it gets absolutely numbing to hear the same song for like an hour. the music itself is like, pretty good but doesn't matter how good a 2 minute song if you hear it 60 times in a row. - don't really like the structure of needing to get collectibles to proceed when so many collectibles just require backtracking. feels very tedious. particularly due to the extras from collecting the minor collectible. - weirdly hard to hit enemies close to the ground due to the stiff and hard to granularly adjust jumping arc - this game spends roughly the first hour teaching the player that "blue is for grapple-able objects" and then proceeds to break that rule for seemingly no reason several times resulting in confusion for every new time it does this. many ungrappleable walls in stage 2 are blue, the world 4 boss fires Blue bullets that do not interact with the grapple hook at all, etc. - many instances where the game will just prevent you from backtracking for collectibles via oddly rude means like a wall that is just slightly too high to jump over. i don't get this. this is just annoying. I wound up tapping out on getting to World 5.
• gamedeal user

  Feb 16, 2022

  The best platformer never released on the SNES. Challenging without ever feeling like it's too hard, or "Hard for Hards sake" Adorable without hitting you over the head with it.
• gamedeal user

  Feb 20, 2022

  I wanted to like this game, as a fan of 2D platformers and seeing how charming is the pixel art, but honestly I felt like I wasted my time on this one Although the grapple can be fun sometimes, the level design is always punishing your for trying to do everything in a single flow, locking you on un-backtrackable save points, hitting you with off-screen bullets and spikes, and overall, being unable to show you the dangers ahead. The movement is also very unreliable, locking you into directions after ground pounds and grapple holds, which starts to get really annoying on the later stages. Many of my deaths happened when I tried to ground pound an enemy and the physics locked my character's movement right into a pit or spike, or simply because the air control was so stiff that I couldn't land on where I wanted to. The bosses were cool, but the stages to them were a drag. I pretty much 100% completed the first 3 worlds but it was so annoying that I decided to rush the bosses just to finish the game. The music and sound effects are very nice and I love the dialogue bark sounds, but after hearing the first stage music for more than 5 levels I just grew tired of it, since it's loop is very repetitive and short
• gamedeal user

  Feb 21, 2022

  putting a grappling hook in your video game is always the best choice