Over the years my wife and I have really begun to dig into local co-op games pretty heavily, and through that time she has begun to get much more critical about what we play. While initially she tended to enjoy gameplay that was new to her and felt original, having now bumped into many genres and styles of gameplay, she has become more discerning. While it’s nice to now have someone else’s opinion to help color the tone and scoring of my reviews, in the case of a title like Lost Twins 2 where there’s a fair amount of potential that has issues, she also tends to be pretty brutal when she decides that she has had enough.

Capable of being played either solo, or with a friend using split-screen play, this is a pretty basic puzzle platformer with one major twist. Rather than being focused on a single play area where you’ll need to do some coordinating to figure out how to collect what you need, you’ll additionally have the ability to rearrange the individual room segments you’re in, reconnecting them in different configurations to bring you success. In each stage your goal is to first collect the 3 feathers located in various places in each stage, and then come together at the phoenix statue in order to close things out and move to the next one. After working through some tutorial levels that try to lay out everything you basically need to know, you’ll be off and working together to work through each puzzle.

While this is a nice general idea, and it’s great that nobody needs to be terribly coordinated in order to play it acceptably, there are some core fundamental problems that make it tough to enjoy, at least in its current state. The first you’ll encounter pretty quickly, and that’s the fact that the buttons you’ll need to use to just get through the menus feel inconsistent and sometimes even contradictory. Why there seems to be a need to find an opportunity to use each of the controller’s face buttons at some point, rather than just stick with the typical B to advance and A to back out or cancel, is baffling and it leads to pointless frustrations at times involving the simplest of tasks before the game even gets going. The crippler though, is problems we ran into with game stability. The fact that on 2 consecutive levels the game crashed just as we finished up, not just stopping the game but then additionally losing track of the fact that the level was done, and making us go through it again, immediately killed whatever enthusiasm we had for the experience. Whatever the merits of the game may be, persistent issues with crashes and losing save data wipes out any sense of good will, so be warned if you’re considering this title, and be sure that it has been patched to get rid of this enjoyment-killing issue.