A single player adventure where you are the Candy Rangers, a group of shooters who take down enemies in this arcade inspired on-rails shooter. Sounds like this can be a fun little adventure right? With a name like Candy Rangers, I thought, how hard can this be? We share a name, surely I will enjoy this. Perhaps you can already see where this is going so let’s dive right in.

The Basics

The game play is exactly what it tells you. There are no surprises when it comes to Candy Rangers. Each of the four characters can shoot in their own directions. As Candy, shoot bullets sideways. As Mint the bullets the will go vertically. Plum will shoot bullets back and forth with Lemon rounding it out with a diagonal direction of the bullets. The characters will also be able to use a melee attack to shove things back in the direction they came from. You’ll also have a few jumping mechanics to reach different heights, the ability to dash forward, and brake momentarily to stop from moving forward. These abilities are very important as there will be times where you must jump to get to the next area or achieve a higher score.

Now that you know the mechanics, keep in mind that each enemy can only be taken down by the ranger that matches the color (and pattern) of the enemy groups. So even if you could hit an enemy with someone else’s attack pattern it won’t count. Be sure you also don’t take damage from the enemies or environmental conditions or you’ll lose time off the clock which may make your run end too early. I didn’t mind some of these mechanics but my goodness, the timer was brutal. Some hits would take away what felt like was half the clock meaning you knew the round was over before it even truly got started.

Gameplay in Action

At times, the mechanics of Candy Rangers feel like it’s straight forward but the simplest mistake can ruin everything. There are also moments in the game where defeating the Unna is probably not best. Some of them will turn into environmental hazards along the way. Perhaps this is a metaphor that we need to live in harmony with some things like bees or ants. Or this reviewer is just reading too deep into it in trying to find some redeeming aspects of gameplay.

Other times, I could not understand why the jump mechanic would split the party. There didn’t seem to be a rhyme or reason to it beyond just to make me take damage and lose time.

The timing of the jumps sometimes felt a bit off too. There would be some double jumps that worked beautiful and helped me hook onto areas. Others would seem to need perfect precision timing so I never knew what to expect with each jump. Would I need to be right on it or would the game give me a little bit of grace? It always seemed to depend on the jump so there was no true pattern. It didn’t help when the characters wouldn’t all jump together as well.

This also feels like a great game for a controller or game pad, but yet, when I plugged in my xBox controller, I received the warning of glyphs and remapping. The few times that I tried, it also seemed to have a small bit of lag which was frustrating so I played the majority of the game with mouse and keyboard. It was fine, but I think my enjoyment may have increased with a controller for this game.

Scoring

There are really two main scoring things mechanics going in Candy Rangers. For starters, there is your star ranking, that seems just to be for your own enjoyment. Start with five stars and lose stars as you break the chain of attacking enemies correctly. Those blue and green enemies are right on top of each other and you accidentally hit the blue with with the green? Say goodbye to one of your stars. Of course, the stars feels a bit less consequential when compared to the other scoring mechanic.

In addition to the stars, there is a straight forward point system. Shoot things correctly, don’t get hit so you don’t lose time on the clock, jump on the bullseye at the end of the run, and get a high score. Your high scores would unlock the photos in the gallery. They call these the memory photos. Some of these appear to symbolic memories from the run you just completed, others may have happened prior to you taking over as Candy. While the photos show off some cute art work, they do feel a bit unneeded. You can complete the game without collecting every photo as I did, but for completionist you may want to run through the levels over and over to get them.

The final “scoring” system which I hate to call scoring is the ranger medals. Find ranger medals throughout the levels. You’ll need them to unlock future levels and boss encounters to complete Candy Rangers. There are more than 50 of them out there, but you’ll need at least 50 to get to the ending of the game.

Story

With the mention of the ending of the game, let’s be clear that this game does have a bit of a story it tells. It has very few story notes and it might have even been better without this. The story feels like a bit of an add on.

It begins with an introduction to the Unna, a tribe that lived in harmony with the earth. Ultimately the Unna abused the earth’s blessing and were cursed to become wandering creatures and monsters. Now they hurt the land and as rangers you take them out along the way. Balance or whatever. We then meet Candy who is waiting for her training session and can’t find the guns. Not a great start but who are we to judge. The training guide Inky will start to give you all the information you need including the fact that there are quite a few vacancies for Rangers so it’s not luck or skill, they just needed to fill the roles.

Practice your skills and navigate through the map to collect your medals, gain stars, and unlock the cute photos. Simple enough of a story. But then we learn the truth of everything. We work for a corporation that is ready to replace us with robots. I understand that this is a reality that humans have been facing since the industrial revolution. It feels as though so many games are going through this trope right now. Whether the rise of machines or AI, it feels like we’re seeing a lot of games with machines bad humans good narrative. Which can be fine when told in a compelling way, unfortunately this just felt like an add on.

So you get your 50 tickets to prove to the CEO that you’re still useful. This just makes way for you to fight the machine he wants to replace you with. Once the machine gets out in the wild, you have to take it down, and it fights the same way you do so be prepared for that. You’ll also be fighting the Unna at the same time for some unknown reason. Despite the fact that the machine was programmed to do your job it fails spectacularly. When you go to strike it down, it will only fight you across all the maps you’ve explored in these 20+ levels. The Unna are seemingly safe from this machine. Oh, and some of the Unna will actually also fight against you in this final fight. Others will actually come and help you without explanation so enjoy the unexpected partnership!

When all is said and done, you’ll create your own new Ranger System to strike a balance. Because of course you can go from trainees to running it all with just some help on paperwork in the span of a few hours.

Art & Music

This is the saving grace with much of this game. The art feels somewhat reminiscent of anime from the 80s and 90s. The eyes remind me of something from Sailor Moon or classic Dragon Ball. The hair styles definitely have that anime vibe, and the music is quite enjoyable even if you’re getting frustrated with some of the game play. The music fits the aesthetic of the game which is a nice match. When the moment is serious because you’re seeing the CEO and his machine, the tone becomes darker. The small tings pick up in pace to match the nerves and anxiety of the moment quite fittingly. Although perhaps there could have been some shift in music with the CEO goes flying out the window presumably to his death.

The memory photos you retried do try to give you some insight into the characters which is cute. But it just feels like it’s so little in the grand scheme of it all. We see one photo of Lemon looking closely at some Unna after one stage. This ties into the moment when Lemon shares a desire to study the Unna at the end of the game. A story line perhaps was scrapped somewhere along the way? The artist really put work into these images and they do tell somewhat of a story so kudos to the artist.

Inky

What I do wish I could have seen more of was the Inky mode were you get to play as the paper pusher. Unfortunately, each time I tried to load a level with her, the game would just freeze. I did finally get one good run in with her and saw how broken she was. Inky may have been too overly powerful. She can shoot in every direction which makes it easier for players to collect all the points and keep those stars. For those who are trying to get all the medals and all the pictures, if you can get through levels with Inky, she’ll help you 100% the game.

Final Thoughts

There isn’t too much more to say about a game that took a solid five hours to complete. Inky might be the redeeming bit of the game, but overall, the game is just very average. While it doesn’t have a ton of flaws, it just also isn’t that fun for anyone who doesn’t love on the rail shooters. There’s some amusing bits here and there and a ditzy main character may be your speed but overall the game is so average it’s forgettable. I won’t say that I would refund the game if I had purchased it, but I’m not sure I would revisit it beyond the hours it took me to complete.

During the best of times, it felt like a game that was a school project. At some of the worst times, it felt like a game that I’m not sure who it was made for. Maybe there is a subset of gamers that really enjoy on the rail gun games, or maybe those who just want a very quick shooter. Either way, in a year that has been incredibly competitive with games unfortunately Candy Rangers does not rank highly.

Candy Rangers releases on October 2, 2025 on Steam, Switch, PlayStation 4 & 5, Xbox One, and Xbox Series X|S. Candy Rangers was reviewed entirely on Steam. Gamer Social Club would like to thank Jandusoft (publisher) and Mechano (developer) for the review code.