Have you ever bitten into a chocolate only to be repulsed by the flavour of the filling? Coffee crème is a pretty good candidate, or perhaps coconut. That was my experience with this on-rails shooter, only not so much disgust but rather disappointment – like finding out a box of gifted chocolates expired several months ago. That’s a better fitting analogy.
Candy Rangers does a good job of inviting anyone curious in, featuring stylish menus, colourful visuals, and lots of finely drawn artwork of our heroines – Lemon, Plum, Mint and Candy. It even does a pretty good job of explaining its basics, educating with dedicated practise stages, before gradually layering on new mechanics. A good thing too, considering this isn’t a typical vertical or horizontal shooter. Even by on-rails standards, it’s quite innovative.
Our quartet of world-saving rangers walk along a pre-set path automatically, making it your job to clear waves of enemies – with the cutesy animal adversaries including moles, bats, bees, and crabs. Each wave of enemies is colour coded, corresponding to one of the ranger’s weapons, each mapped to a face button on the controller. Using the correct colour starts a combo and will kill enemies quickly, while using the incorrect colour causes far less damage and emits an audible chime.
The first few stages include things such as branching paths, before eventually introducing platforming jumping, ergo the need to leap over hazards, and the ability to parry. Much later, dashing and braking are added, both of which play in the tight time limit of each stage. See, you’re up against the clock here, with each hit taken knocking either ten or a far more deliberating twenty seconds off the clock. Together with swapping weapons, trying to memorise patterns and leaping over obstacles, this makes for a very demanding experience – especially when multiple foes appear at once. By the midway point, every button on the controller serves a function, with jumping, parrying, dashing and braking mapped to the triggers and shoulders.
Stages last a few minutes each and are intended to be replayed. Not just to obtain a five-star ranking, but to collect every ‘Ranger Coin’ hidden. It soon transpires that these are near essential to collect, used to unlock an area’s boss and its final stage. You can only get away with missing one or two within an entire world. They’re mostly found within alternative paths, or on high ledges requiring double-jumps – which you only have one shot at. If you’re trying to collect a stage’s last coin and fail to grab it, you may as well hit the retry button. The world map has been spread out in a non-linear way, so that you may even have to progress to the next world and return with more coins just to unlock the previous world’s boss.
There are quite a few playful touches present, such as being able to kick a tin can along the path before volleying it into a rubbish bin, and you may notice Nintendo-like influences such as coins appearing along the path ahead and the ability to send crabs spinning into enemies a la Mario’s turtle shells. Bosses are reasonably creative too, including a horse that charges around a field, and to add additional variety ‘tower stages’ see a single character battle solo.
I was having a blast with Candy Rangers for its first couple of hours, and that was despite the difficulty briskly rising during the second world. Here, making too many mistakes is fatal, often seeing you go from having thirty seconds on the clock to just ten – making it impossible to complete a stage unless a time extension is within reach. There were stages I had to retry around a dozen times, making its colourful visuals and cartoony presentation quite deceptive.
It was within the third world – a coastal region with decks and piers – that the difficulty level skyrocketed, going from being challenging to unfair. Glitches also started to appear, with one branching path route broken (resulting in having to wait for the clock to reach zero), along with a boss battle that appeared unwinnable due to featuring incorrect button prompts and a lack of opportunity to attack.
Try as I might, and even after six hours of playtime, I wasn’t able to progress through the second half of the final world due to the inability to beat said boss, consequently falling short on the ‘Ranger Coin’ quota. Presumably either the developers didn’t playtest the game’s second half thoroughly or became so skilled at their own game that they didn’t notice the difficulty spikes.
Candy Rangers is something I wanted to like – and was originally smitten by – only for everything to come crashing down, much like being an hour into a junk food binge. There’s something worth salvaging here, so fingers crossed patches for balancing are planned, because right now, it’s more like gnawing a bone than crunching candy.
Mechano’s Candy Rangers is out now on all formats. Published by JanduSoft.