The revival of Bubsy, the mascot platformer hero who never quite got off the ground as one of the greats, feels more like a wink and nod to folks who remember (and didn’t necessarily enjoy) the middling series he starred in than an earnest attempt to drag that series to the level of platforming excellence offered by its contemporaries. Bubsy 4D is a game full of jokes, jabs, and meta references to other video games and pop culture, and in a way, the fact that it feels bad to play almost comes off like an extension of that tongue-in-cheek attitude: Bubsy’s platforming couldn’t compete before, so isn’t it funny that it still can’t in 2026?
Every time I think I’m being too dismissive of Bubsy 4D, I remember that it comes from Fabraz, the same team that made the delightful Demon Tides earlier this year. That game is an incredibly tight, smooth, and weighty platformer that knows how to make movement feel precise and also freeing. It’s a delicate balance that not every platformer developer can manage, but Demon Tides absolutely nailed it. So what the hell happened with Bubsy 4D?
The game breaks my biggest platformer rule: movement shouldn’t be so slippery and floaty that even the most simple running and jumplng are a hassle. Bubsy 4D has a lot of movement options—the anthropomorphic cat can run on all fours to get a boost; he can perform an imprecise homing attack that never quite seems to lock on the way it should; and there’s a “hairball mode” that turns Bubsy into a Super Monkey Ball-style orb that rolls through areas at nearly unsteerable speed. Nearly every traversal ability you have in Bubsy 4D comes involves poor controls and physics that take all the joy and real challenge out of a genre that usually invites replayability and score chasing, replacing them with frustration.
Bubsy never seems to go where I tell him to, and I can only deal with an unruly cat for so long before I find it a new owner. Yeah, he’s funny and the naked, shoe-sporting “Hedgehog Style” costume with a big pixelated blur over his crotch made me laugh, but funny only makes for good memes and social media screenshots, not a platformer I want to keep banging my head against to get through.
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