Cereus Peashy is finally out, and they guys from Divirge really delivered with the finesse and polish they said they were working on. If you read our preview of this game, you’ll already know how amazing I though this game was.

The art is fantastic. Once again the world of the badlands is brought vividly to life, with twisted characters, which Edmund has told me were originally inspired by roadkills he had to clean up in an old service job he used to work.

The sound is dead on for a platformer like this, and the ambience that mixes with the subtle (but amazingly well composed) music only servers to further draw you into the game.

The gameplay is solid oldschool platforming taken up a notch. There are elements from Sonic (rolling as a spikey ball… building speed as you run,etc…) and Mario (collecting coins for 1-up, super stomping baddies and powerup containers…) as well as some fun additions like the bloodlust you go into after killing so many baddies.

After playing the older, preview version as much as I did, I was quite sad that they changed what happens when you die.

In the demo, if you died, you would lose a life and drop back down from the sky ready to keep on trucking. In the final version, if you die…you end up at square one and have to start over.

The final game also has a lot of performance slow-down due to all the extra effects that got added to polish the game up. It looks amazing on the highest setting, but even on my Dell XPS, I had to drop all the quality settings down to get it to an enjoyable splay speed.

Between having to play in low quality, and the starting at the beginning when dying thing, I actually got too frustrated to play this game for more than 10 minutes. If this was an NES game and I was still 12 years old, my gamepad would have been thrown at the tv at least 6 or 7 times.

This game is probably not going to appeal to the casual player as much as the older demos would have, but if you are more of a hardcore gamer and you are looking for a fun, and extremely challenging game…. Peashy is the game you’ve been waiting for.

[ Play Cereus Peashy ]