Thank you Black Shell Media for sending us this game to review!

Super Ubi Land was successfully Kickstarted in March of 2013 and exceeded its meager $5,000 goal.  Because of the similarity in the name, Ubisoft had the developer rename the game to Super Ubie Island.  The Steam Remix game has quite a few differences from the regular version.  Some of those changes include tweaked levels, cheat codes (which I couldn’t find anywhere online), in-game achievements, more secrets, and enemy rewards.  Unfortunately, the lives system is different and you only have one life with two hearts now.  The two hearts allow you touch an enemy but spikes and water are instant kills with no checkpoints to respawn from.

Like many games involving aliens as the protagonist, Ubie crashes his spaceship on Earth and has to locate and fight bosses to reclaim the pieces to put it all back together.  When the ship crashed the worker bees at a hive became scattered and the queen bee will reward you for bringing back her missing children.  Each level has three bees to locate and your progress is automatically saved when completing a level.   The levels are challenging and chances are that you will have to complete them several times to collect the available bees within them.  

There are coins to collect which can be spent at the shop and you can purchase customizations for Ubie like the ability to change his color to black or pink.  The enemies will drop coins or hearts upon their deaths and in a few seconds will respawn again.  You’ll see an outline of them so you can know where they will be resurrecting from.  Many of the levels have trophies and plants to uproot for more points or health.  Last but not least are hidden diamonds that have great rewards if returned to the man that hid them.

Other than collecting stuff and stomping on enemies, there are many jumps and double jumps to pull off to reach the end of the level. Ubie has a balloon that he can use to glide around as well.  Some of the platforms will start to crumble or explode when Ubie lands on them.  Unlike the enemies, they do not respawn.  Fans of classic platformers will appreciate the typical platformer elements in this game.  

The art style is simple, but functional.  Each world has a different look and feel ranging from forest levels to desert ones.  There are a decent amount of enemies and they are not to be underestimated, especially the spikey or exploding ones!

Sound wise this game is pleasant, but not memorable.  The sound effects are cute and many of the actions have descriptive sound effects that are funny if you pick up on them.

While I was able to enjoy Super Ubie Island Remix using a controller, I did encounter some issues.  Steam does say that this title has partial controller support, and that’s true since some of the actions in the game menu had to be triggered using the keyboard.  Another issue I encountered was that my Bluetooth controller would stop responding in-game.  In order to activate the controller again I would have to bring up and exit the pause menu using the keyboard.  While annoying, this issue was not game breaking.  I still preferred the game controller over keyboard controls.  

The last issue worth noting is that upon exiting the game, the NWJS process still runs in the background and you have to manually stop it in order to play any other Steam games since it thinks you’re still in the game and will not let you launch another.

In the end, Super Ubie Island Remix is a cute platformer that challenged and reminded me of many SNES classics.  While this game doesn’t bring much new to the genre, it’s still fun to play and worth picking up when it goes on the inevitable Steam sale.  Hopefully some of the glitches will be ironed out soon though.