Firstly, the game is really fun! The rest of this post may sound negative, but that's not because I didn't have fun
it's just because fixing issues is the most important way to make sure new players have a great time.1) The single biggest turn-off for me is the loss of progress after checkpoints. If I uncover every secret, collect every coin and destroy every badguy, then die after a checkpoint, I lose all that progress. For longer levels, this is very annoying.
2) It took about half a minute to discover how to use fireballs and couldn't even understand the backflip sign until I did one by accident three levels later, to me it appeared to say 'press up and down directional (arrow) keys', rather than 'crouch and jump'. Could ST detect input device (e.g. keyboard) and display the actual current keybindings?
3) During my first play of Welcome to Antarctica (tutorial), I fell into a spike pit before reaching the Fire Flower info box and as a result, it gave me an egg. This was slightly confusing. If this is considered an issue, a second fire flower powerup in that same row of boxes could be used to ensure a fire flower will appear in that row.
A similar thing happened with the first Glide Flower in Above The Clouds. This is especially important because it comes after a checkpoint, so it is easily possible to be have no egg powerup when first reaching it.
4) The options menu shows left and right arrows for settings such as volume. Pressing the left arrow increases the value (tested on Windows). Either make the arrow a button to change value in the correct direction, or just remove the arrows.
5) In one of the levels (The Crystal Mine, I think?) there are green dots which move towards you to attack. Whenever I was hit, I was teleported to its origin, which usually resulted in lava damage. The first or second one teleported me under the collapsible blocks before the collapsed, causing an inescapable lava death despite me having fire flower powerup.
6) Moving around the overworld to select levels can take a long time, especially things like sailing back to the mainland. It's nice for it to be a long time the first time, but after that, it becomes annoying.
Apart from this, the levels were mostly fun and challenging. It's a great game and I will happily keep playing. I felt that the Halloween levels were particularly fun due to the amount of items placed as well as some of the community island levels due to their inventiveness.
