If simple's what you want, mazel tov
As an indie developer myself, I try to support others in the field as much as I can. I buy every indie game that interests me (budget willing) to show I care, especially ones that I feel could be tragically overlooked. For every indie game that makes it big for whatever reason, there's about 100 that deserve the same level of popularity, but don't. I suppose that's true of every facet of life, though.
Unreal Land struck me, at least in screenshots, as potentially being one of these overlooked but good games. The bright, sunny-looking graphics are a stark contrast to the grimdark or black comedy platformers I'm used to seeing, and as far as I could tell from research, it doesn't pull an Eversion and get scary partway through. That isn't to say that I dislike the more disturbed, adult platfomers out there, but seeing a more wholesome entry to the genre in a sea of darkness is a bit refreshing.
Sadly, however, despite Unreal Land's potential, there really isn't a lot to it. Not only is it super generic and basic, but it seems quite half-assed, in ways.
The story is literally as simple as this: a tornado takes a kid's balloons, and he goes off to find them, taking some (nuts? fruit?) from a tree to use as a weapon. Now, I don't require a sprawling epic from a platformer (although it wouldn't be unappreciated), but there just seems to be something missing. What the heck are all of these bizarre creatures and where did they come from? Did the tornado displace them from an alternate dimension? Are they just a facet of life in the world the boy lives in? There seems to be potential for a storyline at least on the basic level of Super Mario Bros., to tell you who you are and where you are, but it just falls flat. Neither our nameless protagonist nor the baddies he comes across are given any characterization, and it just FEELS like they should.
On to the visuals, which were what initially impressed me... they definitely look better in screenshots than in gameplay. Everything's smooth and cheery, and the parallax scrolling is pretty neat, but animation is truly horrendous. The main character only has a cycle for walking, and that's it. Despite being able to jump, shoot, and push, he has no animations for this. He can't duck, either. The enemies also suffer in the same way, with just a movement animation and nothing more. The sun in the sky is a nice touch to the happy vibe that the game gives, but somehow overlaps the trees, blocks, and platforms in the foreground. With its frowning whenever something unpleasant occurs, though, it seems like it has more characterization than any of the game's actual characters.
Aurally, the game does well with the sounds it has, with the nice, catchy tune and solid sound effects, but it suffers from having far to few of both. After several levels, the music starts to feel dull, and there needs to be way more sound effects for the actions that take place.
Finally, the gameplay is where the title shows the most disappointment. Your only actions are to walk, jump, and shoot (and push a trampoline should you come across one). Super simple, and yet it feels super lacking. You can't run, which makes the pixel-perfect jumps I've come across way more taxing than they should be (more on that later), and there isn't any sort of power-up/upgrade system that will give your character new powers or a better weapon. As indicated before, you can't duck, which also makes specific spots in the game much tougher than one would imagine due to enemy placement. One aspect that I thought might have been interesting, had it actually been implemented, is the ability to destroy spikes. In several parts of the game, the spikes plus enemy placement are super tricky in a way that seems like it wasn't intentional. Your ammo makes the spikes blink, like they are taking damage. However, hammering the attack button for two minutes doesn't do a bloody thing. Considering that the game went out of its way to have a specific event occur when you attack the spikes, this seems like an oversight.
The playable character's jump seems very off-kilter, like he rises slowly, then drops like a stone. This makes jumps that feel like they should logically work, end up with the character taking a spike to the butt or dropping into the drink. A few spots look super easy, but because of the wonky jump physics, I ended up losing three or four lives because I didn't jump from the furthest edge pixel or something... Considering the first one was in level 2, and the rest of the level was more or less a breeze, it stands out. There's no way to mitigate this, either, by getting a running jump, since you can't run. It just feels super flawed.
Glitches don't seem to be rampant, but are frequent and random enough to be annoying. There was one instance, where my weapon, which normally can fire up to three times in succession, dropped its rate by two-thirds. This didn't seem to have a catalyst, and every attempt I made at recreating the event failed. It seems as if my firing speed slowed down significantly for no reason.
One final issue of note, is that the game offers a Continue option, which has a message in French (although the rest is in English) that seems to be a password entry field. Given that I've gotten several levels deep without seeing a single password, I'm not certain how to generate these things. They're not mentioned anywhere in-game or on any of the press materials. Also, if you try to start a new game after exiting out of the password screen, it brings up the password screen again, which seems like a rather obvious bug.
Unreal Land seems like a platformer that gives you the impression that it could be decent, even good, but the execution is handled extremely poorly. It reminds me strongly of a broken, unfinished, unreleased game that I worked on to learn how to make a platfomer (and considering that my current output is trash, my early stuff is obviously worse in comparison). Although I detest most of what Unreal Land has to offer, though, I do hope to see more from this developer and I hope he or she improves significantly with their next effort.