Enchanted Portals Review

Several years ago now I was waiting patiently, jumping at every snippet of information on anything that would show me more about what to expect when the rather stunning-looking Cuphead would eventually arrive on our consoles. For me, it was the fact that not only did this game look absolutely incredible, but it offered character and polish alongside its deliberately dated and hand-drawn artistic style, and for that reason, I didn’t mind waiting the multiple years I did for it to arrive and eventually blow me away. When I saw the sudden arrival of Enchanted Portals, and early images took my mind straight to a comparison of Cuphead, I felt incredible excitement that another game had come along to offer me more of that same type of experience. However, within five minutes of booting the game up, I realised all I was experiencing here was a game that was capable of producing some pretty pictures and nothing else of any real value.

For those yet to hear of Enchanted Portals, much like me before it arrived, the game is very much an obvious attempt to recreate the golden ticket that was Cuphead. It’s a 2-D platformer, playable in both solo or co-op that puts players into the lives of rookie magicians Bobby and Penny, as they find themselves stuck between dimensions after playing around with a magic book.

The game has multiple platform levels and several boss fights spread across a variety of worlds and dimensions that make up the adventure with each boss fight consisting of multiple phases and each level offering several different enemies. Decorating this multi-dimensional world is a colour palette rich enough to paint a Disney fairytale and visuals that look like a 1960s cartoon. However, the experience truly is just so dull, no matter how good it looks.

You see what makes the game Enchanted Portals is quite obviously inspired by so good are the tight controls, the polished gameplay, the lack of handholding and the enhancing soundtrack to tie the retro feel together, and when this is met by clearly unique visuals, we were given a game truly like no other. When you want to copycat this experience though, the visuals alone won’t be enough. You need gameplay that is either as polished and finessed or better. Now for me, you’ll struggle to find better but as a platformer, Enchanted Portals is quite simply a flop.

The game swaps the focus from boss battles to standard levels, with bosses being the opponents once you’ve arrived at the end of a world, save for the last world which acts as a boss rush, however each level with Enchanted Portals not only places random enemies in any space it can fit them, ensuring it fails to match the pace or design of any given stage, it effectively feels like all you are ever doing is traversing a corridor in which enemies and awkwardly placed obstacles are littered amongst it. I say this because as early on as the opening level, whilst I was still getting used to things, I found that if you were to fall down a hole and die, you’d respawn from the top of the screen and this would happen whilst the levels itself is still moving forward as if on a scroll. This could mean that when you land, you could land back in another hole, just in front of an enemy, or if you’re a little savvy with it, you could push all the way to the side of the screen and skip huge chunks of the level and enemies entirely. It’s not good as a checkpoint system, it’s not good technically, and it just feels lazy.

What makes matters worse is the gameplay mechanic for combat sees players utilise multiple spells to attack. Each spell has a colour and each enemy will require one of the spells at your disposal to dispatch them with the colour surrounding the enemy showing which spell is required. It sounds unique and like it could make things a little different or even unique, but in reality it’s a poorly executed feature that helps the entire experience nosedive, and when you have multiple enemies around you, all requiring different spells, it essentially becomes an awkward affair of moving about to ensure your enemy is in the right place for you to attack before the other enemies get in the way.

Another major irritation for me was the lack of directional awareness when firing spells. Essentially any game like this should utilise either vertical, horizontal, or diagonal firing lines, however, this only works if your enemies are limited to filling these spaces. Sadly too often I found myself shooting diagonally at flying enemies in particular, only for these enemies to move out of the way and no matter where I stood, I found myself unable to attack them at all as they’d be just off a little too the side where I couldn’t fire to ensure direct contact. It made the experience all the more frustrating and even though Enchanted Portals isn’t an overly long experience, my time with it took a little longer due to simply having enough and turning it off.

By now you can probably tell that this isn’t an experience I’ll be recommending you try, and for good reason, but whilst this isn’t going to be winning any platformer of the year awards, or any awards of any type if we are talking seriously, one thing that I do have to say is that the visual department deserves a round of applause as it’s the visuals that originally got my attention to want to review this title at all and even whilst I was growing more frustrated with gameplay, the visuals were still very much something that I found looked impressive, both during the standard platforming levels and the boss battles.

Sadly though I was disappointed enough that I was even able to notice that the audio is equally as unimpressive too, and whilst sounds often suit the stages associated with them, there is nothing unique or organic about them, with the sounds used easily passing by as something you could find in any other subpar titles and with the audio experience a big part of what makes Cuphead tie together so nicely, it’s another area that wasn’t given the same attention that the visuals were.

Conclusion

Overall, if you want an old cartoon-style game that can give you quality platforming, stick to Cuphead, Enchanted Portals may look the part but it isn’t the part where it counts and it’s real use is to showcase to sceptics what makes its inspiration so good.