One of the types of games I’ve been happy to see resurge in popularity in this generation has been arcade-style titles, capturing the essence of games I played throughout my earlier years, and sometimes even honoring classic titles in the process. The thing is, just like back in the day, not all games in this style work out to be very fun, so we’ve had plenty of misses to go with the hits. In principle, the puppy-saving action and positive vibes of Rescue: The Beagles got it off to a good start, but it unfortunately didn’t take me long to start seeing some irritating issues. 

I think the primary among them is what can feel like pretty loose controls, in particular when it comes to falling between levels. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that the promo materials specifically point out how newbies could struggle with dying from high falls, instead I think it’s just an issue that dogged them and they couldn’t quite resolve. In principle I wouldn’t mind needing to be careful about the distance, but I had two issues with this design problem. The first revolves around the parachute, which unfortunately needs to be manually triggered. This makes the mistake of thinking people could merely eyeball a fatal distance versus a safe one, or that it would be easy to quickly trigger its use before you’d die in that brief decision window. Simply making it auto-trigger when necessary could have resolved the whole problem, but instead it becomes a persistent frustration. Part of the reason for that gets back to the loose controls, as it’s very easy while falling to move laterally quite a lot, shifting from a spot that’s safe to fall into one that isn’t.

My second issue is likely a combination of going with procedural stage design and poor planning, and it adds another layer to the concerns with fall distances, and it’s with how often trees in the foreground interfere with your ability to clearly see where you’ll land. Yet again, this feels like an issue tied to poor design and a lack of forethought and proper testing to identify problem areas and deal with them. With such fundamental issues I found that I really didn’t care too much about the power-ups or bells and whistles the game has to offer. It gets too many key elements too thoroughly wrong right out of the gate, and no value added extras or things of that nature will compensate for flawed core play.