Volcano Escape is a vertical platformer / twin stick shooter / see how far you can go kind of game where you start at the bottom of a volcano and try to get to the top to escape the ever growing amount of lava.
You will have the choice between multiple characters that unlock as you progress in the game. Along your progression you will find various upgrades like weapons, jet packs, Jump increase, etc… but also a downgrade in the form of a jump decrease that your will want to avoid.

The volcano is randomly generated which makes for an excellent replay value. That said the placement of both the upgrades and downgrades is also randomized which makes for weird situations where you would have to risk dying in order to get a downgrade box :/
I would have preferred that the downgrades were always easy to get (so that the game tricks you into taking them) and the upgrades were the ones you’d work hard for. Not a show stopper but a sign of a game not 100% polished yet.

One of my favorite things in this game is the fact that you can see where other players died and it always feels good to know that you’ve beaten someone’s best score (especially when it’s your friends.)
Another really cool innovation is the fact that when you kill the enemies they turn to stone that float on the surface of the lava and you can use them to cross the volcano. Flying enemies will also challenge your vertical progression as they fall on you after their death. A welcomed added difficulty that can also be used at your advantage. Nice work Bravo.

It took me a while to put my finger on what is wrong with the gameplay of this game but I always felt that something was off and here’s the conclusion I came to:
The gravity is too low. Often I end up bouncing of of a platform just because I was going sideways and end up falling to a certain death. The speed of the player should be different when jumping and when walking around. (slower while walking then jumping)
Also the double jump and the wall jump will require quite some time to get used to. You see in order to wall jump your movement stick needs to be directed at the wall you want to jump from (which is perfectly normal) but once you press the jump button if you keep your movement stick facing the wall the friction of the wall will prevent you from jumping much higher so you will have to train yourself to jump and immediately change the orientation of the movement stick in order to jump high. My tip: use the movement stick to push against the wall for quite a while before attempting to jump from it again otherwise you will move away from the wall and most likely fall to your death :/
The placement of the controls would also benefit from a couple different configurations or, even better, a custom placement option but none of these are available. (I for one would have preferred that the jump button and the shooting stick would have been reversed.)

The price of $2.59 for a non universal version surely doesn’t help my decision but I’ll still have to give this game a:

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