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High Score: 11015
M&M’s Adventure Stats and Records
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Tag Archives: Platformer
M&M’s Adventure Review
It’s time for another game in the M&Ms saga. The previous ones weren’t all that bad. The DS game’s gameplay was pretty interesting and you can’t really mess up a racing game. This was the first one to be a full platformer though so that naturally came with some considerable risks. It has quite a few glitches and plays out like a slightly higher budget version of Ninjabread Man at times. The game definitely makes some mistakes and I’d have to call it a bad game. It’s not on the same level as some of the other disaster titles, but it makes enough of the wrong moves to sabotage itself like having to replay a whole chapter if you lose. Lets dive in!
The game starts on Christmas Eve as the M&Ms are getting ready to lock up for the night. Unfortunately, a security breach occurs and all of the M&Ms are stolen. The heroes have to quickly re grab all 120 of them before leaving, but they are now being guarded by a Snowman who likes to yell “Its hot”, The Easter Bunny who is very hungry, The Nutcracker who wants to blow everyone up, and the Halloween Man who is trying to scare everyone. Fortunately our brave heroes won’t back down when candy is on the line.
The gameplay is very straight forward. It’s a 3D adventure that “should” play out like a Mario game. You move and jump as you cross the level. Getting to the end is your destination, but not the goal. You must find all of the M&Ms in each level or else you’ll have to replay it anyway. Each level has 3-4 areas which can be as large as an average level in another game. You must beat them all without losing all of your lives or you’re sent back to the beginning and you’ll need to grab the M&Ms again. That is definitely the most annoying part of the game. Most of the levels aren’t all that difficult, but the last 2 are tough. There is a huge jump in difficulty between levels 2 and 3.
Level 3 has you go through many jumps with metal birds trying to peck you along the way. It seems like you can possibly step on them or lure them to a bomb, but it’s much harder than it looks. With enough repetition you’ll get through it, but the levels can be long so you don’t want to have to replay them too much. Fortunately to counter this, the bosses are incredibly easy. The only one that is even a little difficult is the final boss which is also very generous with health bits everywhere. For the Cupid you just have to hit a bunch of switches. Taking down the Bunny just means luring him to candy and you lure the soldier to poison smoke. You lure the Lantern to bombs and take out the Snowman by hitting a lot of switches. Either the developers didn’t put too much thought into the bosses or they just didn’t want to make them too difficult. Imagine having to go all the way back at that point.
There is one part of the game that is just unfair though. In Green’s last level there comes a point where you have to board a boat as cannons shoot at you. The problem is that you die instantly for no reason. It’s possible an unintentional glitch in the game or something, but that’s it..you’re done. The only way around this that I found was to just jump in the ice cream and swim to shore. It takes up a lot of health, but at least I lived. I wasted a lot of lives trying to figure out why I was dying though. It would be like an invisible energy blast hit me or something.
Fortunately the game has so many glitches that you can exploit them as well. You can jump on air to skip parts of levels by just mashing jump and you can also achieve infinite lives. The way to doing the latter is getting a lot of coins like 98 for example. Then you reach a checkpoint. After that you grab the final 2 and keep on going. You get the extra life from this and then even if you die, you’re brought back to 98 coins at the check point. Since the coins reset despite the life sticking around, you can keep on getting lives forever. Figure out what section it the toughest for you and do the coin trick at the nearest checkpoint. This helped me a lot in the Snowman level. Hey, if the game is going to pull out cheesy tricks to stop me from winning…then two can play at that game!
The graphics are nothing special, but they get the job done. You can always tell what is happening and the level designs are pretty clever. The Christmas levels have the best designs for sure, but the Halloween level is surprisingly spooky as well. There are creepy portraits everywhere and even the music feels rather dire for the heroes. I think they put more effort into the soundtrack and levels than the gameplay so their priorities may have been a little mixed up. It was fun hearing Jingle Bells and Sleigh Bells ring at the end. It helped show that the developers cared about this game at least a little.
There isn’t any replay value here though. Once you gain the 120 M&Ms you are completely done with the game. That’s the end of your adventure and it’ll be time to put the game back in the drawer. The campaign isn’t all that long, but it is artificially lengthened by having to play the same levels as all 3 characters each time. If you ask me, you shouldn’t have to collect all 120 M&Ms to see the ending. That’s like having to grab all of the Stars in a Mario game. It’s something you should want to do, not something you have to do. Mix that in with the tedious nature of having to replay levels while looking for M&Ms and the game definitely gets hurt quite a bit.
There’s also a glitch where you’ll turn invisible if you try to approach the M&M machine. I guess the game won’t even let me look at the cool candies that I’ve collected eh? Well fine, I didn’t want to look at them anyway. I should quickly mention that each M&M has an ability. Red can fly whenever you see a flight symbol, Yellow can double jump, Green can swing her tennis racket whenever she finds a tennis symbol. Red’s flight levels are the best part of the game so I wish they had appeared more. It was certainly better than the main part of the game.
Overall, This game had a lot of potential, but the gameplay’s just a little too weak. You know there’s a problem when some levels are purely luck based. I almost died at the very end with Green because you have to dodge falling rocks for about 3-4 minutes. I barely survived and since I had 0 lives left that would have been fairly upsetting. I do like the challenge at times as some of them can be fair, but then we should get more lives or every stage should be its own level. That would fix a lot of issues. I died a lot of times on the revolving Ice Cream door which is easily the toughest part of the whole game. Seriously, just try to get out of that one in one piece. It can hold its own with some of Mario Maker’s toughest levels. Having to go back all the way is just too much of a detriment. The game is only about 5 dollars so if you want a real challenge it’s worth taking a look. That being said, it’s not always fun to play and games should at least be fun. I’ll have to give this one a thumbs down and I recommend Mario Galaxy instead. Even the ending was very lackluster.
Overall 4/10
Frogger’s Adventures: Temple of the Frog Stats and Records
You thought there would be stats in this game? Think again, Frogger doesn’t play like that. It doesn’t even tell me how much play time I have.
Frogger’s Adventures: Temple of the Frog Review
I saw that the next Frogger game was only about a buck on Amazon so I realized that I needed to snag it. Who doesn’t want to start off the day with some nice Frogger adventures right? That being said, shipping was 4 dollars so it nearly hit the 5 dollar bin. It’s a very short game so that’s definitely more or less what it is worth. You can beat the game in about an hour if not sooner. The gameplay is fun though and while one aspect worries me, it’s a wholesome game. (Like the 1 dollar pizza stores it will satisfy your craving for a delightful experience)
The game starts with the bigwigs calling in Frogger. They need him to find all 4 of the legendary elements, defeat the bosses who guard them, and liberate the Frog Temple! Frogger’s on board with this since he’s always wanted to leave the swamp but pretends that he just wants to stop the villains. The elders let him go and Frogger gets to work at doing what he does best…knocking out the baddies!
After the interesting (glitchy) PS2 Frogger game, it was nice to see one go back to its routes. This is the Frogger that you’ve likely grown up with as you move from space to space. You’re not dodging cars too often here as you’ll be dodging characters and animals the whole time. You can only move one space at a time usually, but you can jump which lets you cover 2 spaces. You can press B to stick your tongue out, but that’s only good for grabbing butterflies which gives you lives. Use L and R to turn Frogger around. These are the only controls in the game so you’ll be able to master it in seconds. The simplicity is what got Frogger popular in the first place and I can see why. A lot of simple games became masterpieces like Mario, Sonic, Pac-Man, etc. Of course, complex games can also go down as legends like Final Fantasy, but that’s another story.
There are 5 worlds and each world has 3 levels. They range in difficulty from easy to relatively difficult. None of the levels will stump you for very long which is nice. You get 5 lives and if you lose them all you can just hit continue. What worries me is that it said you only have a few continues left and the number started to go down. I completed the game before it hit 0, but I get the crazy feeling that it’ll take you back to the beginning of the game if you lost it all. Surely this wouldn’t be the case…right? I’m going to assume that this isn’t true but if it is and I had lost all of my lives, I’d probably deduct another star from the score.
The graphics aren’t bad. They’re decently bright for a GBA game and the sprites are on point. It’s not one of those games that will make you take a step back, but considering that the game feels like it had a low budget otherwise, I’d say that it did pretty okay for itself. The soundtrack is utterly forgettable though and you won’t be able to remember any of the tunes. It’s as generic as it gets and this felt more like the game you’d expect.
We have to address the elephant in the room, the game’s short length. It’s hard to justify a game only having 1 hour of content. There is no replay value either since there is nothing to collect. This will definitely be a 1 and done experience so you definitely have to get invested into the game. I enjoyed the gameplay which is why it has a positive score, but if you bought this for full price back in the day you should definitely be pretty upset. I wouldn’t pay 30 dollars for one hour, much less 50. That would be crazy and you’d basically be spending a dollar for every minute that you play the game. No, that definitely doesn’t sound like a blast to me. Keep the length in mind when you shop for the game, you need to get it at a good price.
The story is pretty forgettable, but that’s fine. For a game like this, you don’t expect much. I am glad that the game actually did have some bosses though and slight voice acting at the very end. That was a nice touch. The game was fairly innovative with the bosses considering that they were working with a very limited style of gameplay. It was a good test for my reaction times that’s for sure. The final boss nearly nailed me a few times, but I definitely wasn’t going to go down easy. They had some good designs as well.
There’s one part of the game where it tries to troll you so watch out. It says that you need 50 coins to enter the final world so I went out of my way to grab a bunch. However, you actually need 100 coins since you need 50 for each of the two acts. Luckily, I got that amount naturally but it would have been annoying to have to backtrack at that point. Make sure you earn 100 before you get there. It’s fairly easy if you know to get them, but it’s also easy to just skip them and shave a few seconds off each level. Once you earn 100 then you can fast blast through the levels.
Overall, This is a pretty fun Frogger game. While it is incredibly short, I can definitely say that it’s a lot more fun than the PS2 one. I like the gameplay and it tests your strategic decisions and reaction times. I expect that other versions of this game will likely ramp the difficulty up even further so I look forward to meeting the challenge. The duration is the game’s only weak point but it is a fairly significant one. You have all of the data now so you can decide if buying the game is worth it or not. For what it’s worth, I’d recommend it. 1 hour of fun is better than 10+ hours of repetition right? I look forward to seeing how the next Frogger game plays out.
Overall 6/10
Donkey Kong Country: Tropical Freeze Review
It’s time to review the final DK Country game and possibly the final main DK game of them all. The Country series has been pretty solid for all of the installments so it’s nice to see what the Wii U can bring to the table. The game is a little shorter than Returns and noticeably easier as well, but it’s still a quality platformer. One nice mechanic that they added was the dash and now I can’t imagine playing a DK game without it. It makes the characters so much more versatile and deadly in the levels.I certainly had a blast spamming it and it’ll remind you of the 3D Sonic games.
The plot involves a group of ice creatures deciding to take over a mountain. This angers DK and his pals because they want more bananas and they don’t grow in frigid temperatures. Thus, DK and friends decide to beat people up along the way and eat what they can. Still, can they defeat this Bowser impostor or will the trials be too much for them? The story definitely pales in comparison to the last game though for one key reason…the first 4 worlds are filler. They have nothing to do with the plot and there aren’t even any ice levels in them. For a game that’s called Tropical Freeze, this was a little odd. Once you enter the final 2 worlds then the ice levels start to show up so that was neat. Either way, the level variety is always fun, but I wish the plot could have worked with that a little.
The gameplay is the 2D platforming that you would expect. That being said, as mentioned earlier we now have a dash mechanic. It is incredibly handy as you can cross large distances with the move. It’s also not too automatic or easy so it feels like a legitimate technique that you’ll want to master. If you learn it just right, you’ll find yourself blasting through the levels. The gameplay is very smooth and you can definitely know that this is a AAA game right off the bat. I was very happy to trade in the Wii remote controls for a more proper All Pro and Gamepad setup as well. It’s night and day comparing the two styles for this platformer.
While the levels are significantly easier than DK Country Returns, it’s not really fair to say that it’s too drastic. The main reason for this is that I just got done completing the former so it’s possible that I’m just more prepared for whatever the DK series throws at me right now. It’s like playing Dark Souls 1 and 2 back to back. 2 will probably feel a lot easier than 1 did initially. I do think that Tropical Freeze probably had the tougher bosses though. It’s a close one, but the last boss for example would certainly be rather difficult to defeat in one player mode. He has a lot of health and it’s hard to predict his horn attack. It almost feels purely random. I don’t think any of the bosses are inherently unfair though. They’re tough, but you just need to keep on going at them until you win.
The soundtrack isn’t bad. There are no super hype themes like the Returns villain jingle, but they’ll get you through the stages. The boss theme that plays when a boss first shows up is similar to Mighty No 9’s main boss theme which is pretty interesting. There’s a good guitar/drum solo that works well for that. I don’t really recall any of the stage themes, but they were pleasant enough. The graphics also look pretty sharp for the title. It brought back the Shadow levels and the elements all look really sharp. The characters also look good in the cutscenes. Nintendo never disappoints when it comes to the technical aspects and they rarely do with the gameplay either.
There’s a good amount of replay value here as you’d expect. Collecting all of the puzzle pieces in the levels will certainly take a good amount of time. There are quite a few of them in each level after all. Most of the levels require repetition to really get them down so it’s more about the time than the difficulty. I believe you unlock an extra world if you do that so that’s a nice incentive. It’ll certainly give hardcore DK players a few extra hours to have fun with. The main game will only take you a handful of hours as well. 6-8 I’d imagine, but that’s a pretty decent length for a platformer. Having 8 worlds helps a lot, but 6 will do.
Overall, Donkey Kong has brought us another pretty solid game. If you want to really experience the difficulty as the true DK experience, make sure you choose to play as DK. If you want to coast through the levels a little easier, make sure to pick Diddy Kong or Dixie. They can cheese you through just about any obstacle. I look forward to seeing another Donkey Kong country game rise to the surface. Hopefully the plot will be a little better even though I know that is rarely Nintendo’s goal. As long as the gameplay is good, I suppose the rest doesn’t matter quite as much and Nintendo certainly knows how to handle gameplay. I never got to play as Cranky, but that’s fine. I get the feeling that his special ability wouldn’t have been all that great.
Overall 8/10
Yogi Bear Stats and Records
Stats Time!
% Complete 57%
Continues Used: 0
Picnic Baskets Badges
Jellystone Trail 5/8 3/3
Wolf Forest 3/8 2/3
North Caves 1/8 3/3
Jellystone Ridge 6/8 2/3
Tower Falls 2/8 2/3
Crystal Creek 4/8 2/3
Hawk’s Nest Pass 7/8 3/3
Gold Rush Trail 4/8 2/3
Hanna Cavern 4/8 3/3
Cougar Ridge 1/8 3/3
Barbera Springs 4/8 3/3
Gilder Gauntlet 4/8 3/3
Ranger’s Retreat 4/8 3/3
Dry River Cave 5/8 1/3
boulder Pass 7/8 3/3
Eagle Mountain 3/8 1/3
Huckleberry Canyon 5/8 3/3
Jellystone Lake 2/8 0/3
Yogi Bear Review
I admit that I have never seen the Yogi Bear film. It’s one of the few influential bear films that I have yet to see, but I figured that getting the game was the next best bet. It’s a fun enough game and it was clear that the developers were trying to make this game like a Mario title. They gave it a real effort, but you can’t just make an AAA Mario game with a limited budget and artificial length. It’s fun for 2-3 hours, but then you’ll just go back to playing Mario.
The plot has Yogi show up at the Ranger’s house to steal his lunch. Yogi also scatters the ranger’s photos to the wind as well so now the national park is going to be shut down. Apparently there are no backups and there is no other way to get people to come to the park. Yogi agrees to go and find the animals so he can take new pictures of them and hopefully steal some food along the way. Go fast Yogi!
The gameplay is your standard 2D platformer. You jump through the levels and avoid enemies. You die in a single hit to anything so you have to tread carefully. Luckily, there are frequent checkpoints throughout the level so you’ll never beset back more than a minute. You can do body slams to stun the enemies and get past them safely. You can’t actually defeat any enemies so you need to move quickly so they don’t get back up and take you down for good. There are pies everywhere and grabbing 50 of them will give you an extra life. There are also 3 medals in every level and I’d recommend grabbing any that you see.
At first I was ignoring them completely, but that ended up catching up to me. There is a park ranger who shows up every once in a while and the only way to get past him is to bribe the guy with medals. Getting 2 out of every 3 is a good way to make sure that you can always bribe the guy. They’re not even that hard to get as there will be obvious caves everywhere and if you see an arrow pointing right…go left. That’s all you really need to know to grab those medals.
The game keeps track of your game overs so I recommend playing carefully. I was actually able to beat the game without ever losing all of my lives. I’m trying to act surprised, but maybe this is expected right? Heh heh. The graphics aren’t all that bad. You can see what is happening at all times. It may not be high end graphics, but they serve their purpose. I do have to give the gaame a lot of props for actually having full cutscenes with voice acting within. A lot of Wii games actually don’t have this so it’s definitely pretty impressive. The soundtrack is less impressive and you won’t remember any of the tunes by the end. You’ll definitely remember the sound effects though because Yogi Bear constantly mentions how he’s smarter than the average Bee, Human, etc. He talks a lot during the levels and even talks when you try the bodyslam. As a result, you can expect constant chatter throughout, which is not bad per say, but it can get repetitive.
My main negative with this game is the artificial length. The game coud easily be completed in a single sitting if not for the ranger constantly asking for medals. Once I knew that I needed medals I was able to get enough where I didn’t have to go back anymore, but it was still a little annoying. Lets face it, even if the levels aren’t that bad, it’s not as if I want to go back and play them again. That’s reserved for a big title like Sonic or Mario. It also just shows that the developers couldn’t think of a better way to make the game longer.
There is some obvious replay value…getting all of the medals and baskets. It’s not something that would entice me to play the game again though. As far as I’m concerned, this is one of those games that you play to completion once and then it goes into the drawyer…never to be seen again. It’s fun enough and the price is pretty low so you’re getting a good value.
Overall, It’s good to see that Yogi Bear has gotten his own video game. He’s certainly the kind of character that you can get behind. He’s so mean and over confident the whole time in an “oblivious” way that it works well. The gameplay is good enough to keep you playing and at the very least there is nothing that will hamper your progress aside from the ranger. The ranger definitely brings it down by a star. It’s a good game, but one that you won’t be playing after you’ve beaten it. I recommend giving it a shot if you want a fun little platformer, but the burning question will always be “Why not just buy a more established one?” Still, it is Yogi Bear so that gives it some novelty.
Overall 6/10
Little Big Planet Stats and Records
Stats time!
PS3 Trophy% 15%
Level Stats
The Canyons
Boom Town 35%
The Mines 28%
Serpent Shrine 16%
The Wedding
The Darkness 7%
Skulldozer 0%
The Wedding Reception 23%
The Savannah
The Meerkat Kingdom 6%
Burning Forest 4%
Swinging Safari 29%
The Temples
Great Magician’s Palace 34%
The Dancers’ Court 20%
Elephant Temple 13%
The Islands
Endurance Dojo 26%
Sensei’s Lost Castle 28%
The Terrible Oni’s Volcano 20%
The Wilderness
The Frozen Tundra 35%
The Bunker 23%
The Collector’s Lair 44%
The Collector 100%
The Gardens
Get a Grip 23%
Skate to Victory 18%
First Steps 100%
The Metropolis
Subway 25%
The Construction Site 18%
Lowrider 21%
Little Big Planet Review
It’s time to take a look at Little Big Planet! This game was fairly big when it came out and it took me a while to finally get it. Many people started comparing it to Mario and it was supposed to be Sony’s big answer. Well if that is the case, then it is safe to say that Nintendo won this round by a mile. LBP’s gameplay is decently solid, but the whole game tries to be very “art house” and meta instead of focusing on just being fun and easy to get into. The plot’s also rather lackluster, but what else is new for platformers?
You play as Sackboy. It is heavily implied that the characters know that you the player are controlling Sackboy. The game constantly tries to be meta like this and all of the characters are actually paper cutouts. They are all being manipulated by a mysterious villain known as the Collector so you have to go around saving them all and proving that the Little Big Planet is more resilient than the villain thinks. Honestly, the story would have been much better if it wasn’t constantly trying to remind you that the whole thing was fake. The main villain even cries at the end and quickly turns good so fast that you had to wonder what was going on.
As a result of the game trying to go for a very indie feel, the graphics were actually pretty bad. Honestly, they looked worse than the average PS2 game and I’d take good ole N64 and PS1 games over it. The graphics just weren’t my style and the fact that they were all made of paper just seemed like it was an easy way to save some money on the budget. It was all pretty iffy if you ask me. The soundtrack was fairly decent I suppose, but certainly not memorable. There are no tunes that you’ll be humming to yourself afterwards.
As I mentioned at the beginning, the plot just isn’t good. You have to ignore the graphics and the story and just focus on the gameplay. That’s the only way to really enjoy Little Big Planet. Even then, it is a lot choppier than Mario. Possibly to reinforce the fact that they’re all paper, it’s easy for Sackboy to get stuck to objects or jump a little too far. I died quite a few times in the thunder level because it was hard to control where I was going. It didn’t feel like it would have been much of a challenge if the game had Mario’s level of refinement. It’s just so much smoother than this title.
All right, this has been a pretty negative review so far. Keep in mind that the gameplay is still good, but it’s more at the level of Flip’s Twisted World than Mario. It feels a lot more like an Indie game than a AAA title and maybe it is I suppose. Regardless, it didn’t quite live up to my expectations. I was expecting a very different game than what I got, but that’s the price of not really looking up a game until you buy it. Just as some will be better than expected, others end up turning out worse.
There is a lot of replay value here to help hold the game up. After completing the game, you are only around halfway done at best. There are plenty of other levels to complete and stickers to assemble. Along the way you can aim for the Platinum Trophy which seems fairly reasonable to obtain. It would take a long while though and you’ll need to master the controls along the way. They definitely do get easier to use the more that you play the game. Doing all of this will definitely extend the play time of the game. The actual story is reasonably short and you can complete it in a few hours, but the Platinum should easily take you to around 20 hours if not longer.
There were boss battles in the worlds, which were fun as well. Most of them were pretty easy, but the fights were well thought out. I also think that all Platforming games should have bosses of some kind to change up the gameplay and to just provide a nice challenge. It at least offers the semblance of a story. I guess this game should be described as more of an experience than anything else. You get to run through various levels like a desert or a haunted house. The haunted house was definitely the most tense and atmospheric level while others like the Canyons were fairly generic. There is a great contrast between the various worlds and I suppose that’s a good thing. You can also create levels in this game which is a fairly big deal, but I skipped that part. Maybe I’ll go back to it someday, but with Mario Maker in existence, there’s no real reason to use any other title for level creation.
Overall, Little Big Planet may have not been the platformer that I wanted, but it’s definitely the one that I deserved after not giving him fights on my blog for so long. The game was disappointing which had an impact on making this review so negative, but keep in mind that it is still a decently good game. There is a lot to do here and the gameplay was decently well thought out. I always talk about how gameplay is really the bottom line for a video game and this title is the perfect example of that. The execution wasn’t perfect, but the game did try to give you as much control over Sackboy as it could. You can change his facial expressions, make him give a thumbs up, and a lot of other customization. You can dress him up any way you see fit and that can make the levels a little more entertaining. I don’t imagine that I’ll be buying the sequel anytime soon, but if you’re looking for a good platformer to spend some time on, this one will work as well as any.
Overall 6/10
Frogger: The Great Quest Review
Frogger is a character that we all grew up with, but I never got a chance to play his games. I probably got my hands on one at some point or other, but I didn’t have the privilege of owning any of them. Well, I finally took the plunge with this one. It’s a little underwhelming and doesn’t take full advantage of its gameplay style. It’s a decent game, but there were a number of issues which kept it from getting a solid 7. One thing’s for sure, this is definitely not your Dad’s Frogger. This is a whole new monster!
The game starts off with “Frogger” whining about how he wants to start a romance with a Princess. His mentor advises him to go find one then and “Frogger” takes him up on the offer. Unfortunately, “Frogger” keeps on getting “Your Princess is in another castle” messages. Villains are running rampant across the land and the young “hero” starts to get discouraged. Can he find his princess and satisfy his own ego or is it all over by now?
It’s really hard to sympathize with the main character at all. He’s very transparent about the fact that he just wants a kiss and doesn’t care about helping people or stopping villains. He really doesn’t care what happens to the rest of the world so long as he gets what he wants. “Frogger” is definitely annoying and the only really endearing thing about him is his catchphrase. “Whoa!” He yells that at every occasion and when he isn’t trembling in fear at the sight of the villains, he uses this to mask his terror. You’ll want to brace yourself for the big plot twist at the end of the game. It will fully show you that “Frogger” is not what he appears to be.
I do have to give the game some major props on the ending. Not the kiss part with the Princess recoiling in terror during the moment as that was just weird and the transformation was even wierder. I’m talking about the big cliffhanger that the game decided to end with. It’s unlikely to be mentioned in the sequel although I’ll give the next game some props if it does that, but it was great. All of the villains suddenly show up and start flying around the main characters. The flame head and the three stooges return and you realize that “Frogger” may be a little out of his depth here. It’s safe to say that they took him out and now rule the kingdom since the main character could barely handle them one at a time. It’s a rather somber ending, but the game can get away with it because of how few people know about it or bothered to purchase it back in the day. I’d like to see more games end on such a note. Naturally, it’d be great if they could actually acknowledge the endings and continue them in a sequel as well. It certainly beats the super safe Pizza Delivery Boy type endings…just saying.
The graphics aren’t that bad although they could certainly be better. It’s a very retro style with the mouths opening a lot like in the old Sonic DX game. Unfortunately, it hardly matters with the level designs since they are very bland. It doesn’t help that the levels are so large and you’ll easily get lost since each and every turn looks basically the same. That’s one of the big drawbacks to the game if you ask me. When it comes to the voice acting, Frogger is a lot worse than expected. It seems intentional just because of how bad it is. All of the characters have really fake exaggerated voices and just can’t stop themselves as they utter a lot of crazy lines. A lot of parodies of famous characters like Frankenstein are around and they don’t take themselves seriously so I assume that we are supposed to treat them likewise. If you’re looking for a good soundtrack, you can forget about all of that right now. You won’t remember a single tune by the end.
There isn’t much replay value to be found here and that’s an exaggeration. There is seriously no replay value here since there is no level select and you can’t go back to grab any of the lost jewels to complete your figure collection. There isn’t much point to the collection anyway though since it’s as bland as can be in this game. Considering that the game is also pretty short, this one is not worth a whole lot of money. It took me 3 hours to beat the game and that’s including the fact that I spent about 40-50 minutes getting lost in various levels. You should be able to purchase the game for about 3-4 dollars though so that should help considerably.
As for the gameplay, it’s your standard 3D platformer. You walk and jump through levels as you look for things or just aim to get to the end of a long tunnel. You can double jump, glide, and even shoot spitballs. You’ll want to use the latter quite a lot as engaging even with a minion in hand to hand combat will result in you losing a lot of health. It’s simply not worth it when you can spam them with projectiles the whole time. If you lose, no worries. You go back to the checkpoint, but the enemies don’t respawn or gain back any health so just keep going at it until you win. What is going to be trickier is dodging all of the numerous glitches.
Sometimes a door won’t open and you’ll have to restart the level. It’s usually not all that long since there are checkpoints everywhere, but it’s definitely not very fun to have to do so. The reason is that the door opening mechanics are very precise. You have to click O at just the right point and you cannot be moving at all or it won’t register it. One reset was all that I would need though and it only happened twice so I suppose it could have been quite a lot worse.
Another iffy part is how the camera angles are really bad. One level involves you running through a tower for a very long time with the camera constantly moving. It’s very easy to fall off the stairs and have to climb back up all over again. Slow and steady will win this race. I remember how it took me a few tries to jump on a tree in the tutorial. The controls could definitely use some work and it’s a little sad to say that some Wii platformers have done a better job of this. How bad do you have to be to lose to something like Flip’s Twisted World in pure gameplay?
Finally, Frogger is one of those games that doesn’t give you a lot of advice for when the puzzles show up. It’ll just say “Find a way out” and leave you to your own devices. Couple that with the iffy controls and you could be stuck at some of these puzzles for a very long time. Trust me, you’ll constantly be hoping that the next level is a linear one. The game had most of those towards the middle of the game and that was the best part. Each level only took about 3-5 minutes and it was great. Any level that was huge or had a puzzle would force you to brace yourself for what was to come.
Overall, Frogger: The Great Quest could have certainly been a lot better. It made the mistake of not being very polished and taking the easy way out at every opportunity. The level designs were sloppy and the glitches were annoying. Puzzles slowed down its momentum and “Frogger” was not a very good main character. I did enjoy the ending though and the actual story wasn’t half bad. It was entertaining because of how crazy the whole thing was. When it all boils down to it, the gameplay itself wasn’t too bad. It was imprecise and flawed, but I can’t say that I didn’t have any fun with it. It’s short, but if you find it for a dollar or two, then you may as well check it out. Otherwise, I’d recommend sticking to the old Frogger titles.
Overall 5/10
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