The Book of Ages has lost its pages. Lucky needs to collect them to become the guardian he’s meant to be. Check our New Super Lucky’s Tale review!

 

New Super Lucky’s Tale – Launch Trailer – Nintendo Switch

Join Lucky on his thrilling journey through the Book of Ages, a magical artifact that opens doors to amazing worlds. Meet new friends, explore exciting lands, and recover the missing pages from the evil sorcerer Jinx and his villainous family, the dreaded Kitty Litter.

 

• Featuring a huge variety of gameplay, from expansive 3D hubs, to story-based adventure levels, 2D side-scrolling challenges, rewarding mini-games, mind-bending puzzles, and thrilling boss battles.

• Thousands of collectibles to gather, tons of rewarding secrets to discover, a cast of memorable characters, and an entire wardrobe of costumes for the stylish adventurer.

• This is the 3D platforming adventure you’ve been looking for, designed to delight and challenge players of all ages and skill levels.

 

 

Super Lucky’s Tale released at first as an Oculus VR exclusive, later being reworked as an Xbox One game. It was a colorful and fun 3D platformer, and now the team at Playful has gone back to the drawing board to reboot and revamp it as New Super Lucky’s Tale with some major quality of life improvements, all DLC rolled into the main experience, as well as additional content. How does it play on Nintendo Switch? Time to find out!

In New Super Lucky’s Tale, after the opening story cutscene about the Guardians that protect the Book of Ages and how one former Guardian, Jinx, and his litter, take the book, scattering its pages here, there, and everywhere. Lucky is sucked into a new world and must set out on an adventure to collect all the missing pages needed to put the book back together so that he can return home.

New Super Lucky’s Tale starts you in a tutorial world, which will give you a rundown of the basics of the gameplay mechanics you are going to use for the rest of the game. It will teach you to double jump, dig down into the ground, attack, collect everything there is to collect. Each level has four pages you can collect. One is for completing the level, one for getting 300 coins in a stage (which sounds like a hard goal to achieve, but often you’ll end up with twice as many coins in all stages if you search high and low), one page that is hidden somewhere in the game, and the last one is for collecting the letters L, U, C, K, and Y, dotted around each stage. When you complete a level, you will go to a small hub world for that chapter that has entrances to the other stages in the set.

 

For the main part of the game, I didn’t find any of the stages to be difficult to complete. Other than missing a letter or two in some stages and having to replay them, this one is a more casual and lighthearted platformer on Nintendo Switch. Something else to consider is that Lucky won’t be getting any new abilities as he progresses through the game, so this one is closer to a Super Mario 64 in that way than to, say, a Banjo-Kazooie.

The game does mix up the 3D platforming with some 2D levels as well, which will change the pace of the game. The goals are the same, but it does feel nice to change the perspective of the gameplay since it also changes how you approach these stages in comparison to the 3D ones. There are also some autorun levels, where you need to time your jumps just right to pick up the letters or hidden pages since you can’t just go back and try to grab them – miss one and you’ll have to replay the game.

I will say some of the level design choices are very solid and certainly match the theme of the chapter you’re playing. The first hub world is Sky Castle, which was pretty cool, and all of the levels had that theme, including the little stone golems, one of which wants to be your best friend. The second has more of a country vibe to it with worms that talk in a specific way. One level has you searching for the Soggy Bottom Boys, who have disappeared so that you can help them do a reunion show. There is a tropical world, a yeti retreat, and a spooky ghost world, each one with some very interest NPC. The characters are interesting, and New Super Lucky’s Tale does a good job of giving its characters and worlds a unique look and feel.

Since I do love to play platformers that challenge my skills, I was happy to see that once I had completed the game, some new challenge levels were unlocked in which the difficulty does ramp up considerably, giving players like me a set of platforming stages in which you’ll be tested from start to finish. It was a nice surprise to see these new challenge levels pop up, as they’re more of what I’m used to playing, so kudos to the team for including them.

 

The one thing I didn’t love about New Super Lucky’s Tale was the noticeable dips in the framerate and the slow loading times. I know the Nintendo Switch isn’t as powerful of a console as the HD Twins, and I’m not an FPS snob, but while playing, I saw the game slow down considerably a few times. The loading times are also something you need to get used to since a couple of them took 30 seconds to load in the area before I was able to play. On top of that, using lives in a platformer in 2019 after how Super Mario Odyssey handled things feels a bit off. It’s not a deal-breaker, but something that new 3D platformers need to take into consideration.

Final Thoughts

I had a good time with New Super Lucky’s Tale. It was a fun, quick, and easy platformer with a nice extra set of challenge levels that do bump up the difficulty. The different themes do a great job of bringing each stage to life, and the characters you meet are full of life. The game has set itself up for a potential sequel, and I definitely want to see what Playful is going to do next.

Disclaimer
This New Super Lucky’s Tale review is based on a Switch copy provided by PQube.