Made a mini-review of my take on it.
Balan Wonderworld demo starts off with a beautiful opening cutscene which is quite charming and quite zany. You have the option to play as a Boy or Girl (as far as I can tell doesn't really effect much). Then you enter the hub world. In the hub world you can walk up to each level of the game, at first you only have access to 1. The main gimmick of this 3D platformer is you can transform into various outfits to do task. In the first level you get a Wolf outfit where you jump and cause a tornado spin to break blocks, shortly later you get a dog guy that can flap his legs in the air to do an extended jump. Each main stage has 8 "Balan Statues" (gold statues of the titular character) to collect but from what I've noticed you can't get all 8 in one go.
You can have up to 3 transformations at any one time. You can switch between the power ups with the L or R button. In the event you pick up a 4th, it will replace which transformation was in slot #3. If you take damage from an enemy or fall of the edge of a level, you will lose whichever power up you currently had on. From the bit I've played, in some stages you won't be able to access all the Balan Statues, so you need power ups you find in other stages, meaning you'll have to replay through levels several times unless you happen to know which power up you need for each statue.
Throughout each level there are colored jewels you can collect. I don't notice extra lives in the game (though I didn't lose all my power ups either), and from just the first hub the jewels are used to feed this baby chicks. I've fed them several times, not really noticing much difference. In each stage, you'll find Balan sitting around, when talking to him you'll get a quick time mini game, of the few I've played of him flying around and you have to hit the button at the right time to get a score of Excellent to Ooops. If you get all the quick time events at excellent you'll get a Balan Statue. At the end of each stage you get a item of some sort to go to the next stage. Rebeating a level rewards you with a rainbow jewel. Within the demo the rainbow jewel can be used to feed the Chicken Statue but I didn't feel like grinding out 20 jewels.
After collecting so many Balan Statues you'll unlock the ability to use the train. I'm not sure what it'll do in the main game, as a big cutscene plays out of you getting onto it, but the demo just plops you back in the hub world. Perhaps to go to different worlds? In the hub world besides feeding the chickens jewels. You can have the chickens spin a little wheel in the middle of the stage (they'll do it on there own), after so many spins it'll build something int he center of the hub. In the demo 500 spins is the max you're allowed and I got a Tower up to level 2, other than seeing the chicks play around on it, not sure of it's purpose.
The music in the game is great, the visual are pretty awesome, and the designs of the some of the transformations are neat (albeit on the cute side). There were some issues I had with it that has discouraged me from wanting to purchase it as originally planned. The major factor is the playable character moves incredibly slow. I'm not sure why tey decided the main character needs to move as slow as a snail, doesn't matter which transformation I used so far in the game, I wish you can speed up, I think increasing the movement speed by 50% would probably fix this. Not sure if there is a way to quickly get a transformations from other stages, but the need to replay another stage to get a power up you need seems quite unnecessary. I rather dislike the quick time event things with Balan, as if you don't ace it, you lose the opportunity to try again and have to repeat the whole stage to get another go if you want to get all the Balan Statues. The controls, while they work, are quite simple as you can only jump, use an action, pause or switch power ups. Using the pro controller, 50% of the buttons do the same thing.
Perhaps I'll check out some let's play of the later stages but initial impressions aren't great.
