Back in the nineties you couldn’t move for mascot platformers when visiting your local video game shop of choice. Although those years have long passed, we’ve recently reached a point where between big companies and indies we get enough 3D jumping to keep me happy. I try to play as many platformers as possible both for work and pleasure, but despite this I’ve managed to dodge Lucky the Fox for years. I decided I’d better correct that with the PS5 release of New Super Lucky’s Tale, which is now here in all its current gen glory.
Our hero Lucky lives in a storybook world, but when that story is taken over by a villain called Jinx our foxy friend is trapped and alone. To change that you’ll need to find lots of pages that are scattered across themed worlds, and maybe even make some friends along the way. It’s definitely a narrative aimed firmly at a younger audience, but that’s rather fitting considering the whole game is very much the same.
Like any good platforming hero, Lucky has a few different tricks up his sleeve. He can jump and double jump, and also has the power to burrow underground to avoid danger and find buried secrets. That’s all you really have to worry about from start to finish in New Super Lucky’s Tale, but the movement at least feels good throughout.
Each themed world of the game is broken up into stages, which all feature four different pages to find. You’re awarded these for different tasks, like completing the level, collecting three hundred coins or gathering the letters that make up Lucky’s name. It’s nothing you haven’t seen before from the genre, and admittedly that’s the case for pretty much everything that New Super Lucky’s Tale throws at you.
Although it’s fairly derivative, there’s no denying the variety you’ll find throughout New Super Lucky’s Tale. Some stages are played from a 2D perspective whereas others are 3D with a little bit more opportunity for exploration (albeit still with more of a linear structure). There are also runner style stages, maze stages, hidden sliding statue puzzles, and even some motion controlled ball rolling for good measure. I can’t pretend I loved every single level I jumped into, but none of them out stayed their welcome which I appreciated.
As a collectathon platformer you’d like to hope all the shiny doodads you collect have a purpose, but in New Super Lucky’s Tale it doesn’t entirely feel that way. The main collectible pages unlock boss fights that lead to the next world when you beat them, but any more that you gather than that in a single hub area are essentially pointless. The coins you gather are only useful for unlocking outfits for Lucky too, and while some of which are fairly cute you’ll ultimately find a favourite and then sit on your wealth like a horrible dragon.
For buying the PS5 version of the game you’ll gain two new things, shinier visuals and DualSense support. This certainly isn’t an Astro Bot situation where you’ll feel every careful tinkle in the controller, and that’s the obvious comparison given this is a PS5 platformer. The visuals are bright and colourful, but even they are hard to get excited about. If you’d told me this was a PS4 version of the game I wouldn’t have really batted an eyelid, so if you already own the game it probably isn’t really worth upgrading to this version.
I enjoyed my time with New Super Lucky’s Tale, but ultimately it just feels so derivative. If I played this on the Nintendo 64 I’d have loved it, but there have been many more exciting games in the genre since the nineties, and Lucky feels like a bit of a relic. For a child’s first platformer (if that child doesn’t own a Nintendo console anyway) it’s certainly not a bad choice, and the variety meant I was happy to play it to completion even if I had close to a hundred lives stockpiled by the end.
