As a backer of Koa and the Five Pirates of Mara, I was also looking forward to the next game of Chibig. But Koa had a lot of missing polish and a few very annoying bugs that prevented me from getting all achievements, so I was hesitant to back Mika. Turns out my scepticism was warranted and while there are some nice ideas here and the game is cheerful and has colourful characters (many of them returning from Koa), it still falls short of feeling like a finished product.
Let’s jump on our broom and find out why this one didn’t fully bewitch me.
Reviewed on Xbox Series S | This review is the personal opinion of the writer.
| Developer | Chibig |
| Publisher | Chibig |
Things I liked!
- Colourful cast | I really did like the characters in Mika and the Witch’s Mountain. Some of them fall outside of the cliché NPC cast, like the girl astronaut who was delivering packages before you picked up the broom and postman’s outfit. Or a sad fishman artists who’s missing inspiration while his spoiled kids plunder his credit card. Sadly most interactions with characters are limited to a few phrases for their fetch quests and then you’ll never need to speak to them again.
- Getting to know your way around the island | Similar to A Short Hike, the world starts off feeling pretty sizeable, but you soon learn you can circle around it and take some shortcuts to get to certain locations quicker. Especially near the end of the game when your broom is fully upgraded
Mixed & disliked!
- The world looked pretty empty | When you fly up near the end of the game you notice how much empty space there really is. you have the starting town, a farm close by and then some locations here and there with a small amount of characters. The draw distance didn’t look great, especially for a game that doesn’t seem to require a lot of graphical prowess and it made me feel like I was playing a Nintendo Switch port that mostly kept the limitations of that hardware in mind.
- Hard to get around when it shouldn’t be | The trailers and footage shown from the game beforehand made me think like we’d be able to fly around the island freely. Instead, you basically have glorified floating controls and have to find gusts of wind to jump up in height. it requires careful planning early on to get to certain locations that feel like they should be out of reach, but you can wiggle yourself up some ledges. Sometimes you’ll need to get to a specific area of the map and have to find the same launch pad up there each time, but the minimap doesn’t make it clear because it’s a top-down view and doesn’t indicate height difference.
- Collision detection | Which brings me to my next issue: you need to fly into those uplifting gusts but even flying into them dead-on is often not enough to trigger the jump up and I have to awkwardly keep circling inside them to fly up. Near the end of the game with the better brooms this was a lot better, but you need to power yourself through the early portions to get there. It feels like the game wasn’t correctly tuned to your capabilities in the opening hours.
- Bugs & crashes | I was playing on the Xbox Series S and admittedly: also recording at the same time and every 20-30 minutes or so the game would crash to the Xbox Home page and lose my progress. I’d have to relaunch the game and do the last 2 fetch quests from scratch again. When the credits rolled on me, I had about 8-9 crashes on the counter and I was looking at 5 missing achievements I just couldn’t bring myself to get.
- Bugged achievements | Not a real dislike as it was in my favour, but I unlocked a ton of achievements I had no right to earn early on. I delivered one kite and got the achievement for finding all 3. I bought one cosmetic trail for my broom and got the achievement for all of them. I’m guessing this wasn’t playtested thoroughly on Xbox, but looking at the few bugged achievements on Koa and the Five Pirates of Mara, it’s sadly a returning issue for this studio.
How long did I play the review before publishing? 5h50
How long to beat the story? 3 hours
How many Achievements did I earn before publishing? 28/33 or 800/1000
How long to achieve 1000G | 4-5 hours with a guide
Try this game if you like these | A Short Hike, Little Gator Game, Wavetale
CONCLUSION
Score: 54/100 – A Short Flight with a lot of bugs. I really wanted to like Mika and the Witch’s Mountain as it’s exactly the type of game I normally enjoy, but the many bugs and weird collision detection gave me more headaches than satisfaction. There are some nice ideas here, so it’s a shame there is so much standing in the way for me to enjoy them.
Want to see the game in action? We’ve got your covered with the first hour of gameplay:
Robby lives and breathes video games. When he’s not playing them, he’s talking about them on social media or convincing other people to pick up a controller themselves. He’s online so often, he could practically list the internet as his legal domicile. Belgian games-industry know-it-all.
