Mini review of Enchanted Portals. Disgusting Cuphead clone that will make you neurotic

In my time Cuphead was a real breakthrough. Through hardcore, combined with super fast racing gameplay, beautiful graphics and a clever balance between difficulty and passability, the project managed to win the hearts of hundreds of fans. It was only a matter of time before the concept was adopted. In a short review, we discuss the new product, which is just getting ready for release on September 6, 2023 – Enchanted Portals, confusingly inspired by Studio MDHR’s creation, but different in the most important way.

For developers of Xixo Games Studio, the story of two little wizards has become a debut project. In a creative environment, stealing ideas is nothing new. This process is called polite borrowing, but everything must be reasonable. You can take someone else’s idea, but you have to add something of your own. Xixo Games Studio did something similar, but it didn’t turn out quite as the studio expected.

The first thing Enchanted Portals greets you with is a painfully familiar image stylized like old cartoons. Even some one-on-one animations have been written off from the Cuphead heroes. The thought entered that the projects could be somehow connected, and we witness the prehistory of the strange world of Cup and Mug, but no.

Two young mages (a boy and a girl) find an ancient tome and immediately begin trying out high-level portal magic. The worlds the heroes enter prove to be extremely hostile, so the hapless couple will have to use all of their meager magical arsenal to get away alive.

As weapons – traditional wands that can fire one of three types of spells: fire, ice or acid. Most enemies have auras of the right colors. Killing opponents with a different spell will not work.

Here immediately opens the first problem of the gameplay – broken dynamics. In Cuphead, there was only one option for “cartridges” that did not need to be replaced. Thanks to this, the player focused on what was happening and kept pace, picking up only bonuses and lives. In Enchanted Portals you have to constantly slow down and press extra buttons.

The main feature of the game becomes its main drawback. If you pass the levels, you will get bored very quickly. You cannot interrupt him: you have not gone through the world to the end – you have to start over. Shooting ghosts or other creatures is more like careful dueling, which of course isn’t even close to Cuphead’s furious action.

The second problem is the bosses. In the cup game they were challenging but interesting. The next stages of the main villains could almost completely change the situation of the battle, they had to adapt right away. In Enchanted Portals, things are much simpler. There are also stages, only the developers mistakenly decided that complexity is when there is a lot. Spamming bosses with the same attacks, but so often that sometimes there is no counterattack period at all. This is not a challenge, just a mockery.

Unfortunately, Enchanted Portals is an example of the fact that the original is often better than any copy. The developers diligently repeated all the basic mechanics and visuals of Cuphead, but did not understand the main thing at all – smart and sophisticated gameplay down to the smallest detail. To recreate it it’s not enough to be ‘inspired’, you need your own talent here.