Fluttershy's Bunny Rescue

Fluttershy's Bunny Rescue title screen.

 Fluttershy seems to be a fairly uncommon main character for fangames; which is understandable given her gentle demeanour, and when she is a playable main character the game almost always draws attention to her poor flying skills. It's about time that the gal gets her own game, but the fact that it's about rescuing bunnies is somewhat disappointing. Don't forget that this is the same pony that stared down a dragon and redeemed the god of chaos; shame everypony seems to forget those bits.

 Still, a game can still be good even if it's not exactly epic in scope, right? True, but to find out whether that applies to Fluttershy's Bunny Rescue one must continue to read past the break.

 Fluttershy's Bunny Rescue is another perfect example of a game that is summarized by its title. In fact, I'd be surprised if the game had the player do anything other than retrieve rabbits from the supposedly threatening Everfree Forest. About the only thing remotely unique about this game is that Fluttershy is capable of fully-fledged flight, limited only by the invisible boundaries of the level. If at any point Fluttershy has trouble finding one of the stupid mammals she can go back to the beginning of the level to visit Twilight, who is apparently too lazy to actually go out and search for the bunnies. She has a spell that detects lifeforms, and usually only comes in handy towards the end of the game when only one or two more bunnies are left.

 Graphically the game is not that bad, but it's not especially good-looking. As with most other pony fangames it utilizes the infamous yet undeniably useful desktop ponies collection of character sprites, but given the difficulty of animating four-legged animals this is excusable. I was quite pleased with the incorporation of parallax scrolling in the background, although given the scale of the trees it makes the ponies feel almost bug-sized. The tileset is fairly bland, with the notable exception of the grass tiles. As for the music...FlutterWonder isn't a bad song, but it would be annoying if your friend looped it on his MP3 player while you were out in the woods at night, looking for that blasted rabbit of his who escaped from his hutch a couple hours ago.

There isn't much more to the game than this.
 The most important thing that the game lacks is replay value. Since the bunnies are "hidden" in all the same places Fluttershy's Bunny Rescue is only fun for the first time around, after which the game becomes tedious. I'd go so far as to say that this game is inferior to its predecessor, Cupcake Dreams, which actually had a time limit and conditions for failure (falling into the abyss, touching baked bads, etc). Mind you, there is an alternate mode of gameplay in which it is possible to fail, but it can only be activated by playing at a certain time of night.

 According to InfinityDash this game was initially supposed to be far broader in scope, but he decided to make it simpler so he could focus on some other projects of his. I can understand why he would do that, but it's still a shame that the game lacked random level generation to help with the replay value. At least the hidden gameplay mode makes Bunny Rescue into a much more enjoyable experience, but I still cannot give the game a good score. Then again Fluttershy's Bunny Rescue was never supposed to be an exceptional game or anything, so a Bloomberg grade isn't too bad for a game of this type.

5/10

- Tuxxy

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