Thank you Cosmic Boop for providing us with a review code!

Flewfie’s Adventure is an adorable 2D twin-stick shoot ‘em up (more like cute ‘em up) by Cosmic Boop and Valorware. The main character is Flewfie from planet Cutemellow, a planet where chibi-styled bipedal animals come from. The cat Uzuu wreaked havoc on Scientist Snail’s lab and stole his UFO. Flewfie, Scientist Snail, and their friends Bunn Bun and Pinky Panda must traverse the cosmos to planets where Uzuu has spread chaos and put a stop to him as well as save the many inhabitants corrupted by the chaos.

The world of Cutemellow and the various planets have a very bright and colorful art style to it, reminiscent of equally delightful designs such as Neopets and Club Penguin. Every planet is uniquely designed such as Cutemellow having a more nature-like aesthetic. Later levels will take inspiration from places such as a sugary-sweet land made of cake, a haunted graveyard world, and an ocean planet. The clean art has everything pop out in a good way and manages to be very pleasing to look at.

Flewfie has his own UFO to pilot and navigates the 25+ levels with it—and sometimes on foot. The UFO has full freedom of movement. Whether a player uses keyboard & mouse or a gamepad, shooting is slightly different. For gamepads, tilting the control stick automatically shoots in that direction. For keyboard & mouse, simply pointing and clicking in the direction will suffice. Both control methods work perfectly and choosing one or the other is purely up to personal preference.

Flewfie’s Adventure is divided in three segments. The overworld has you interact with the various characters saved throughout the journey. Sometimes they give out pieces to your UFO or outfit that can increase stats. The levels themselves are designed similarly to an ant tunnel with lots of tightly-packed corridors and places to navigate to and many enemies shooting at you. Shooting at enemies and defeating them earns experience to level up with, and increases your defense and attack. Despite the visual variation for each level, the gameplay loop can feel similar as every level has you collect five tokens, save these creatures called Bundrops through puzzles or obstacle courses, and carry circle or square shapes to unlock doors to further progress. The fact that you’re doing this from the first level up to the very last level means repetition can set in place. The levels and customization could have used a bit of work too as instead of feeling more powerful with higher levels and more pieces for your UFO and costume, it feels like you’re just doing it to keep up with the enemies as they start to scale heavily with each completed level.

Boss battles tend to break the pace of the levels and happen every one or two stages. Each boss has their own unique design as well as patterns both in the way they move and the shape of their bullets. Bosses are mostly fairly simple but can be fun as they keep you on your toes. Some of them nearly adopt a “bullet heck” style and maneuvering through the barrage of projectiles while making sure you do enough damage yourself is engaging.

The last and optional segment is the card game Fyued. It can be somewhat confusing at first, but the rules are that each player is given three cards. The cards are based on enemies and characters seen throughout the game. Each card has three different numbers indicated by left | right | center. Left and right indicate the corresponding spot it points to on the field while center is for when a card is placed on top of another. The higher number wins and swaps the card to your side. Whoever has the most cards on their side after all three cards are used up wins, and the loser has to give up one card. Personally, I didn’t like Fyued so I didn’t delve much into it. Unfortunately for completionists, Fyued is a requirement for 100% as there are over 100 cards and some levels require beating an NPC at Fyued to obtain full completion for that level.

There are three difficulty settings: easy, normal, and hard. Difficulty cannot be switched once chosen, which is a bummer for me because after about a little more than halfway, I started to find the experience a little too easy on normal. I think anyone who has played a shoot ‘em up before should play on hard.

Flefie’s music and sound effects are surprisingly good. The music is of course as cute as the game, but there are also some pretty intense scores with lots of variation. I even caught myself humming some of the tracks a few times. Sound effects are distinct, with each enemy and action having a different one, making it easy to tell apart from some of the more chaotic segments.

Moral warnings, given the type of game this is, are pretty few as expected. As it is a shoot ‘em up, there is violence, however, most of it is light or cartoony in nature. The supernatural elements are a bit more than the violence. There is an entire world based on a graveyard with various creatures such as ghosts, demons, vampires, magic books that shoot magic circles, and ghouls.

Flewfie’s Adventure is best played in short bursts and can be enjoyable if you take your time with it. For the price, it has a fair amount of content. The experience can be somewhere between 6 and 8 hours if you simply play through the levels and mostly ignore Fyued. Since most levels can be fully completed your first time around, the majority of the replay value lies in a harder difficulty or the Fyued card game. Moral warnings are, once again, very few so the majority of people can safely play it. It’s quite the treat if you wanted your shoot ‘em ups to be more on the cute side.