Like most tough as nails platformers on the market these days, Fenix Rage beat me down, humiliated me and made me question my love for games in general. The only difference is that with Green Lava Studios' game; I stopped wanting to get back up. Yes, Fenix Rage is tough, and that's putting it lightly, but it's missing that sense of progression and satisfaction that made games like Super Meat Boy and Spelunky so much fun to play. There's definitely charm in abundance here, and there's an audience that will eat that up but Fenix Rage just plain doesn't hold up against the competition.

"...run, jump, dash and hopefully don't die..."

One thing should be made perfectly clear before you go any further in this review, I hold Super Meat Boy in pretty high regard. The super tough but charming twitch platformer is one of my all time favorite games and truth be told, it's gotten me through some pretty dark times in my life. There's just something about the flow of the game, try, die, repeat that works so well and I could just lose myself in it for hours at a time. Fenix Rage has that, or it does at first anyways - it plays all the right notes and had me remembering the great times I had with Team Meat's initial project, but that faded pretty quick.

In idea and mechanics, Fenix Rage is incredibly similar to Super Meat Boy and other similar twitch platformers; run, jump, dash and hopefully don't die in an effort to get from one side of the stage to the other. Each stage is small and can be completed in seconds if done right but that's all easier said than done. The screen quickly fills up with enemies that are a whole lot faster than you and would want nothing less than to see you fail again and again. You're going to die...a lot, but thankfully you'll respawn quickly and be back at the level in no time. It makes dying so much a bit easier, since you'll have little downtime here, but there are still a ton of incredibly cheap moments that'll frustrate you to no end.

"...the game would find some way to cheat me out of finishing."

The problem with Fenix Rage though is that it lacks much of the originality and heart that games like Spelunky and Super Meat Boy do so well. There's a solid sense of progression in those games that though you're failing over and over, you always feel like you're getting somewhere. You always get the feeling that if you just jumped one millisecond earlier, or landed one inch farther you may be able to beat the level, but that just didn't happen with Fenix Rage. I couldn't help but feel like regardless of what I did or what strategy I tried, the game would find some way to cheat me out of finishing. Did I eventually move past those areas of the game? Of course, but only after the game seemed to try to be as much of a dick as it possibly could and throw random enemies with random patterns that follow absolutely no rules at me.

Ask me about my favorite parts of Super Meat Boy and I'll more than likely blab on and on about the hospital levels, or how frustratingly fun jumping over the fireballs in Hell were. Rogue Legacy? That's easy, I loved finding hidden levels in my playthroughs - that sense of adventure is hard to replicate. My favorite parts of Fenix Rage? Now that's a different story. I dropped a lot of time into the game but can't recall a single level that sticks out in my mind. That could be because a lot of the game feels like it's just cobbled together in an effort to make it as tough as it could possibly be. Again, there's definitely an audience for that, but it's a selective one for sure.

You're going to want to love Fenix Rage, I know I did. It drips with charm (it even has cookie recipes, no...really) and has more than a few clever nods to gaming culture and gaming past, but in the end it just falls short of the games it tries so hard it imitate. It's tough as hell, but it often takes the cheap route to being tough and as a result, you don't get the feeling of accomplishment you get in games like Rouge Legacy and Super Meat Boy. It's fun, colorful and nostalgic, but there's also so much better out there.