How does changing the difficulty affect levels?

Question

There are different difficulty options one can choose when playing levels. Do the amount of points you get (for example, getting gold bars, using jump pads) scale with difficulty?

Are there just more hazards? No checkpoints?

Answer 1

The harder the difficulty, the more the things you must jump on, slide under, block, et caetera, the less dancing opportunities. Dodging more enemies gets you more points, but then even perfecting 1-1 on Hard without the checkpoint becomes pretty hard.

Here's a comparison of perfect scores (plus full bullseye bonus, plus challenge bonus, no dancing) for 1-1 for your convenience:

• Easy: 914,000
• Normal: 940,000
• Hard: 1,025,000

For each level, the game tracks what game mode you've perfected them in.

The yellow exclamation point is for an easy perfect. The blue exclamation point is for a normal perfect. The red exclamation point is for a red perfect. The plus is for perfecting a level and getting the (rather hefty) bullseye bonus. Perfecting a level at a difficulty level does not give you the perfect exclamation marks for lower difficulty levels.

Just to drive the point home, the Stats screen shows you how many levels you got Triple Perfect+'s on. What the game doesn't track is whether or not you skipped checkpoints in the making of your perfect runs. The score will be affected by that, however.

116 alternate-reality Commander Videos were harmed during the making of this answer.