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(+4)(-7)

Okay, so I played this on Switch, and these are my thoughts:

First of all, rating: 6.5/10

Positives:
It is aesthetically cute.
The music is pretty good.
There are some funny bits to the dialogue.

Negatives:
The combat is... not good, honestly. It's mainly just "whack an enemy from a very short distance" or for bosses "kick bomb into boss". There is no reason to ever actually fight a boss because 3-4 bombs defeats every boss in the game, and getting close enough to hit him with melee almost guarantees you take damage.

The game is insanely easy on its default settings, and provides options in the settings for increased damage and even godmode. If the story had been compelling enough this would make sense; but as it is, it makes an already easy game trivial. 

The dialogue and story fall flat pretty often. Having Turnip Boy be a silent protagonist is a big part of this, I think. Almost none of the other characters interact with each other at all, so most of the game feels like you're just having text directed at you, and the "funny" parts don't seem to know what they're going for; a game where the central idea is tax evasion is obviously targeted at adults, but a lot of the jokes wouldn't even be funny to a kid. 

The biggest issue: the length. To 100% the game, on my first playthrough, knowing nothing about the game, took me an hour 50. And about half of that was running back and forth to do sidequests. There's just no content. At a $15 price point, I'd expect about 3-4 hours, reasonably; or an extremely polished and witty gem. I got neither.

If this were at a $6;99 or $7.99 price point, it would be an 8/10. But when there are great indie games like Undertale or Cuphead or Stardew Valley for $15, this doesn't cut it.

i mean, personally i dont think the combat is that bad. its simple, but i think people dont like it mostly because they are used to faster paced combat. if you take advantage of all the items in every boss fight, you get the most fun out of the combat system. but if you just spam a couple things for every boss its gonna get stale quick. thats why they have gameplay elements like portals. also, the difficulty shouldnt be put as a negative. for any game, hard or easy. its just the difficulty. if you dont prefer easier games, then just dont get them. when you talk about the length, thats a pretty reasonable complaint.  undertale  is longer and was only made by 2 people. cuphead is longer and for the same price. but  they spent less time to develop turnip boy. cuphead spent quite a long time developing.  and both of them  got really lucky with gigantic kickstarter funds, and this didnt have as big a budget. i personally think im willing to pay a couple extra bucks to support the studio, especially because they have a new game coming out.