Oct 5, 2023

One of the best kaizo hacks I've played. It's full of creative jumps and uses a bunch of banger music. Something that makes this hack so much better than other hacks as well is that every star has its own challenge. You don't have 5 rather easy stars and then do everything in one go for reds. Reds are either completely unique or don't force you to go far into a stars path and sometimes it's not even the hardest star of a level.

Another thing that I've never seen in other kaizo hacks are act specific warps to make stuff easier. For example in c13 you have to do that huge climb only once, instead of 6 times, which makes it a lot easier and also a lot better, since especially reds would be miserable without that warp.

You also only need 60 coins, which makes the coin stars a lot better. There even is a hidden s7 in every stage, but I hardly even found those.

Obviously this is still an extreme hack, so sometimes I got quite frustrated over chokes. Throughout the entire hack I had over 30 last jump chokes and a lot more far in deaths. The star that annoyed me the most was c12 secrets, because I choked the very end 11 times.

I just want to talk about the hardest stars I got. I won't rank them by difficulty, since they are very different, so it's hard to compare. I will just go in order I got them:

36:25 B2 Reds - Has pretty cool jumps, but it's a huge difficulty spike. Especially the ending is really chokeable, so I got very nervous. Pretty sure it's harder than B3 reds.

1:44:16 C10 Reds - Best ending to a red coin star I've ever seen (for obvious reasons), just not too fun doing it under a lot of pressure. I actually choked very close to the end right before and I feel like that made me even more nervous. I thought about changing my route, but luckily I got it this attempt.

3:12:55 C11 Reds - Found a lot of strats and cheese for this star, but got very annoyed at it. I couldn't get past the switches ever and every attempt that got past it died in the worst way possible. Then I had another attempt past it and I got blue screened. I tried to go live again multiple time, but it didn't work because of different reasons. After restarting my pc like 4 times I gave up, After some more practice I somehow got the star first try the next day.

3:43:43 C12S5 - Reds are also challenging in this level, but I would say this star is harder. Even getting it with states was insane. I got a bit more consistent, but I have no idea how I choked the ending only once.

4:15:08 C13 Reds - As I said above this without the warp would be horrible. The warp gives you some routing options and you can do the shell early. I constantly died to it, so if I was forced to do that last I would've gotten like 12/13 x10.

4:54:14 C14 Reds - Probably the second hardest star in the game. Seemed completely impossible at first, but after doing the other stars and practicing it a bunch it became a lot more viable. Had a lot of fun with it during my first session. Would even rate it 10/10 enjoyment, but sadly I was stuck at spawn for a while during my second session, which was kinda frustrating.

5:16:59 KBR2 Core - I practiced this for many hours and guess got quite consistent with it, since I got it within 7 minutes of attempts.

5:23:43 25 Reds Core - Morning will love this star, but I didn't have the best time. I couldn't get any attempts and I constantly died because of frames collision patch. After 20 min of attempts my pb was still 3/25.

6:05:55 C15 Secret Challenge - I love the idea of the secret challenges. A short but really difficult challenge with the theme of the previous level. However this seemed too difficult, so I put it on the side for a while. I practiced it before work and still had like 15 min left. I really wanted to do attempts for some reason and I somehow got it on my last attempt, so this is the only star I got offline.

6:20:09 C1 Reds - Choked wtih 16/17, but got it the literal next attempt.

6:36:37 C15S3 - Other people might not see this star as that hard, but I am horrible at that glass maze part. I only wanted to do some practice, but bubzia raided me, so I did some meme attempts and somehow I completely fluke this star with just 2 death in the maze.

7:02:00 B4 Reds - For sure the hardest star of the game. It looked so impossible when I first did it with states and I took a long time to get any consistency. In fact I practiced for 7h before even starting attempts. My literal second attempt got very close to the end, but died to missing a wallkick and right after I got another very far attempt, which also died to missing a wallkick. After that I was stuck at spawn for quite a while, which got very frustrating. Hard to judge the actual difficulty, since I got very consistent in practice. In fact I almost got the star from the first turn.

Again overall amazing hack. Everyone should give it a try even without the most kaizo experience. However you might have to invest some time if you plan on going for 100%.