Underland: The Climb

Like its predecessor, Underland: The Climb is 30 single-screen levels. It took me a little over 3 hours to play through in its entirity. If you measure games by playtime, then, well, at least it was at a price where three hours of playtime is reasonable.
It's a 2d physics/"fizzics" puzzle game, where you select your character or various machines with the mouse, then control them with WASD and space. Unfortunately, there are no means of rebinding keys, which really annoys me because W to jump just doesn't work for me, especially when I'm using space (for an interact key, like what E is normally used for), and space should be jump. At least 15 minutes of that playtime was redoing levels after walking into acid because I pressed space to jump. Also, this game interprets having a controller installed as "always walk right", even after I disabled controllers and tried making right on the stick do something else, making me have to unplug my controller.
Beyond that, the game is more of a puzzle game this time than just a platformer where you have to time your jumps. A half-hour of that playtime was me actually getting stuck on the last few levels for a few attempts. Unlike the first game, this game has a pickaxe which is just a free click dirt removal tool. This is both much easier to use and somewhat more demanding, as any jitter in your lines can have weird effects on your attempts to roll balls down slopes to fly over gaps and hit targets. The extremely slippery TNT trollies are much less prominent, meanwhile, which is a plus. The most fiddly thing this time is the acid, and you have a lot of levels where you have to wait for acid to feel like flowing to another platform from a flat surface. The main character is fortunately immune to single drops of acid, but it hilariously (or frustratingly) pops aliens by the dozen.
Speaking of which, the monstrous aliens use the same logic as Lemmings or Goombas, and will happily walk straight into laser beams. Most levels require "herding" them into locations to stand on pressure plates to let you escape. It makes you wonder how the rest of humanity was dumb enough to be killed by a horde of "walk left until you hit a wall, then walk right" morons when there's apparently floating platforms and lasers with infinite-use power supplies just lying around abandoned. In fact, there's at least one level where they start you off next to human-eating aliens, but you're safe because since the last game, the aliens forgot how to jump over a knee-high obstacle. Hey, humanity, all you had to do to stop the alien invasion was flip a table into the way!
All told, this is a game that costs less than a coffee, and lasts slightly longer, so if you want your puzzle games not to overstay their welcome, this is certainly that.

The Underland sequel: The Climb plays fairly differently, in a good way, though. It’s still a 2D physics puzzle platformer, but instead of the first installment, it focuses on good and challenging puzzles rather than nifty 2D physics. It’s no longer possible (at least for me) to jump to a solution when you see a scene for the first time. We often have to figure out first how the elements presented in a level work, how to apply them towards a solution, and in which sequence. It seems some levels can be solved in different ways (but those may be lucky shortcuts). The game is not terribly difficult; however, some levels can be rather challenging. I wish the game would be a bit longer (maybe 40 levels instead of 30) and stick with its own style of puzzles (the sliding puzzles feel rather alien). Nonetheless, we get 3.5 hours (give or take 1.5) of genuine gameplay, and I have to say I was well entertained. The game is not super-polished, but overall fine, and I can recommend it to puzzle lovers on sale.