Panic Porcupine review for Nintendo Switch, Xbox One, PC

Panic Porcupine?s developers describe their game as a ?Meat-like/Hedge-like mashup.? I hate to just uncritically relay a developer?s self-description, but it?s awfully accurate. If you were to smash together the original Sonic the Hedgehog games with Super Meat Boy, this is probably what it would look like.

Mind you, just because the developers know how to describe their game, that doesn?t mean blending of the two games is seamless. While Sonic and Super Meat Boy aren?t that far apart in a lot of ways ? both, after all, focus on getting to the end of each level as quickly as possible ? they also have some key differences. Sonic, on the one hand, was all about speed, and occasionally stopping to free some trapped animals. In the case of SMB (and other twitch-platformers), by contrast, precision is just as important as speed: you need to go fast, sure, but you also have to perfectly time your jumps to get from Point A to Point B without dying.

Or, to put it another way: can you imagine what Green Hill Zone would?ve been like if there weren?t just the occasional obstacles and enemies, but chainsaws rotating inside loops and countless little spikes scattered across walls and ceilings? And, on top of that, you basically need to spend all your time doing that little turbo roll to make Soni ? er, sorry, Panic going as fast as he can?

Of course, for some people, that description may sound awesome. And if you?re one of those people, I think you owe it to yourself to check out Panic Porcupine, since it really is a twitchy version of 2D Sonic. While you can?t always judge a game by its screenshots, in this case you can: Panic Porcupine absolutely could?ve been released on the Genesis, and no one would?ve batted an eye.

HOF Studios provided us with a Panic Porcupine Nintendo Switch code for review purposes.