Super Anjelo LAND 2: Anjelo's sporting a sequel

I'm going to be straight here: I HATE sequels. I hate sequels just like I hate remakes. It's not that I think the original is always better, it's that I can't review remakes or sequels because I feel I'm being unfair to it. Generally I tend to compare a sequel/remake to its predecessor to high hell, either over glorifying the sequel/remake for being ten times better than the original or blasting it unfairly because it's not what I expected the sequel to be.

To put it simply: I tend to judge sequels and remakes unfairly, generally forming a biased opinion.

However, when the creator of the Super Anjelo Land series, and a collaborator for my previously reviewed game: Anjelo's Province asked me to review the sequel he did to the original Super Anjelo land, I obliged simply because he was a cool guy and I was a supporter of his series. I suppose that I can't really hold this off any longer, so let's get on with the sequel to Anjelo Land 1:

Super Anjelo Land 2: Anjelo's Own World

Now for this review, I'm going to give points to both Anjelo's Province and Anjelo Land 2 because both have their good and bad points that I need to bring up and compare. I'm going to try and stay neutral as possible in my judgement, but I'm also going to try and draw connections between the two games, so excuse me if this gets confusing.


Our sequel expands from its predecessor in the color department and just slightly in the control. What it has not gotten better about, however, is the glitchiness. I hate to start this off on a bad note, but it's something that must be addressed before I can go on. The first game had a few glitches, but nothing that majorly detracted from the game play. This game is excessively glitchy in several areas, particularly the collision detection. I suspect that this is because of a different engine. (Pressing F1 during play will bring up the readme for the original engine, though the name of it isn't explicitly mentioned.) The slopes are my main gripe: They're only in 45 degree angles when they connect to the ground. Attempting to move up to a slope that steep from the ground will result in you either colliding with it like a wall or glitching through it, resulting in a death. Usually it's the latter, though I've occasionally glitched into an inescapable scenario through this. (I'm looking at you Vast Lands, level 2!)

The graphics for this are bright and colorful, which is definitely a plus considering the original was monochrome. (Though to be fair, because the original was making fun of Gameboy games, that was kind of the point.) Anjelo himself looks decent, though I don't like the flipping sprite he uses for his double jump. It's too basic, and could use a few frames that show Anjelo himself kind of curled up. Other than that, the environments look incredibly abstract and beautiful, while the enemies are just as clever looking as the first game.

For Anjelo's moves, he's gained a double jump that looks somewhat like a screw attack, and he can still fire bottle caps(I was right, those are bottle caps.), but he's lost the ability to stomp on enemies. While he also retains his ability to jump after falling ala DKC, it only works once, meaning you can't do a double jump.

The levels are, like the graphics, bright and colorful. They feel somewhat non-linear, and they're full of little nooks and crannies that will net you more bottle caps or health pick-ups. You don't get the level names in game or in the readme file included, aside from the first, but I've found them out else where and I'm going to share them here:
World 1 is called Demon Field
World 2 is called The Vast Lands
World 3 is called MoonShift City 
The artwork really fit the level theme, and try really hard to stand out from what you would normally connect with them. Demon Field ditches the hellish-type landscape normally associated with demons to go for more of a Green Hill Zone at night with ghosts flying in the back. Vast Lands tends to make you think an endless plain, but it's really a snowy level with precarious heights and a dark cave. MoonShift City however.... I think it's a little too loud with its palette and the way it's presented. Blue is fine, but you might want to make it a different shade or hue, like Cyan for the foreground and dark blue for the background.

Aside from this, I had one particular problem with Demon Field. The boxes littered throughout the level just can't seem to decide whether they want to be a background object or something a little more solid and interactive. In my opinion, I think that the level would benefit from having different types of boxes.

Music is kind of iffy for me, because it's not really consistent with the style, though that may be because the game is still in development. It constantly switches from a mixture of Chiptune and Rock to MIDI sounding instruments, to pure Chiptune. Sound effects themselves are okay, though any and all sounds found in Moonshift City are nothing but pure annoying. (I hate ANY type of high-pitched noise, so don't take this one to heart though.)

The enemies are, like I said before, imaginative and fun Anjelo's Province. Despite this, they are annoying as all hell to interact with, mostly because Anjelo cannot stomp on enemies anymore and has to rely solely on hitting them with bottle caps. In particular, any enemy that fired projectiles made me want to turn the game off in frustration just because of how annoyingly placed they are. They don't necessarily add challenge to the game, but that's mostly due to the fact that they only inflict 1 point of damage to your massive 10 point health bar. They're just placed in inconvenient spots/have annoying AI.(I'm looking at you, bats.) I was able to tank my way through almost every level, simply because: My healthbar was too big, the enemies didn't inflict a lot of damage, and there were health pick-ups around every corner. I know that they're early levels, and they're supposed to be easy, but they're a little too easy. Even the bosses are a little too easy, because you can just stand in one spot and fire bottle caps at the boss.

One final problem I would like to talk about is based around the bottle cap shooting aspect. The first time I played the demo, my bottle caps went down every time I shot them and went up every time I picked a new one up. The second time I played, the amount of bottle caps I had wouldn't go down when I fired, but they would still go up when I picked up the caps I'd fired. This allowed me to have at least 700 by the second level of Vast Lands.

However, what's the point of gaining bottle caps if they don't really do anything? All you really need to do is grab one and you'll have infinite ammo. There aren't any lives in this game, so you can't get a 1-up. There aren't any unlockables, as far as I know, so there's that.

So yeah, my final thoughts on this are as follows:

It's looking pretty good, but it could use some work, especially with the engine and the collisions. I think that the creator should take out Game Maker's default functions and place in his own. You can still access the default GM save features and the F1 information trick for starters. This should be replaced with an in-game save prompt and either an instruction manual of some sort or a readme file that actually tells everything you need to know about the game. Fine tune the graphics a bit and focus on making the enemies an actual challenge to fight and less annoying to deal with. And above all, make the game a little bit more difficult, please?

Oh, and one last thing to do if you've beaten the game and really want one last thing out of the demo:

Don't listen to the readme file, press the backspace key at the title screen. Trust me, you'll love it. I won't tell you, because I don't want to spoil the surprise for you, but definitely try it if you want to get the most out of the demo.

Like the previous review, I'm going to link to the demo for the game down below:

Super Anjelo Land 2 Demo 2