"Another Mediocre Action/Platformer"

I went into this game with high hopes, and really tried to like it. The game had an intresing premise, some quirky and original characters, and some undeniably pretty visuals. Unfortunately, the gameplay doesn't stack up to the rest of the game, and the story pretty much becomes a self-collapsing vortex of predictability.

Story: 9/10
Death Jr(DJ) and his friends are on a school trip to a museum. They want something interesting to write the report about, so they wander into the "forbidden" section of the museum. DJ's crush, Pandora, tries to open a box, but can't. DJ tries to impress her by using his scythe to cut the box open, in doing so releasing a great evil upon the world(here's where the story gets stale). So it's up to DJ to reclaim his friend's souls, and put everything back the way it was before his dad, Death, finds out.

Visuals: 8/10
No complaints here. All of DJ's friends look nicely detailed and smooth, almost up to PS2 quality graphics. Strangely, DJ is the worst looking of the bunch, his model is full of jaggy edges and bland colors. Most of the enemies in the game(hellspawn demons for the most part) have a fair amount of detail, but you will rarely get up close to them so it kinda defeats it. The pre-rendered cutscene at the beginning of the game looks fantastic, too bad it's practially the only one. They more than get the job done.

Music/SFX: 6/10
Here the game starts to decend into the mediocre-game hell. The guns sound incredibly generic, and the "twin pistols" sound more like cork-popper guns than a real pistol. All the guns sound incredibly wimpy, usually emitting a weak sounding "pop" when fired. All the music sounds like it came straight from a Tim Burton movie, it's all halloween-themed and I guess fits the game well. There is one theme per character you have to rescue, and you hear that one theme across all three areas you need to complete for that character, then another for the museum hub. Gets repetitive, but nothing so bad you'll want to mute the PSP. Voice acting is nonexistent short of the opening cutscene, everything is done in text boxes.

Gameplay: 3/10
In the first few minutes it looks like the devs(Backbone Entertainment) tried to emulate the highly successful Ratchet and Clank series in terms of controls and gameplay. But they got lost somewhere along the line, and failed miserably at it. Where R&C games had tight, responsive, and intuitive controls, with a spot-on camera that was always where you wanted it, DJ has sloppy, unresponsive controls with an absymal camera that can't stay on the action for more than 2 seconds at a time. If this game was combat-only, they would be fine, but for platforming they just don't cut it. Trying to make precise movements with the analog nub while fumbling around with the camera is anything but fun. Weapons can be swapped by pressing left or right on the d-pad, or pressing up will pause the game and bring a ring out of all the weapons to choose from(Ratchet and Clank, anyone?).

Now that we've esablished the sloppy controls, lets talk about the nasty camera. For the most part it's fine. Except if you're fighting an enemy, or strafing, or using the lock on, or doing anything at all. So it pretty much blows. Whenever you lock on to an enemy, the camera follows only that enemy, leaving you blind to all the others trying to wreck you. Holding L will bring into a first-person view, which I guess is for "precise" aiming, since you can't move in this view. Tapping L will center the camera behind DJ again, but it just swings wildly again, requiring you to be pressing L almost constantly.

The actual gameplay is pretty straightfoward. Go into a character's "area" from the museum hub. Then progress through each level. Once you complete each level, you get a "piece" of that character's soul. Get all three pieces to rescue that character. Rinse and repeat for all of DJ's friends. Once in the levels, it's more straightfoward action/platforming. Kill all of the enemies to get their soul, get to the end of an area with enough souls(never a problem, there are way more enemies than necessary so you will always have plenty of souls), the gooey wall will go away, and then you repeat until you get the piece at the end of the level. There are all the standard platforming tricks, like swinging from beams and hooks, ledge grabs, and a hover move to help cross larger gaps. Problem is, half the time you can't see these gaps until you fall into them, since the camera blocks their view.

The scythe is your "main" weapon, but it becomes useless about 30 minutes into the game when you get some good guns. The scythe has no ranged attack, stictly melee. Guns have a near infinite range, but so do enemie's vision. They will see you miles before you can lock on to them, and some have ranged attacks. Most are terrible inaccurate and can be dodged easily(pressing triangle does a little dodge move). Some have laser-lock accuracy and are near impossible to dodge, and these do the most damage, up to 1/3 of your health in one hit. Fortunately, health and ammo are literally everywhere, so you can keep blasting away without worrying about running out of ammo.

This game is also very, very dark. It looks like everything in the game was smeared with a gray paste. Colors are pretty much all bland and dull. It's not like I was expecting a seizure-fest of colors like in Mario games, but it makes the game look dull, bland, and boring.

Buy/Rent/Don't Bother: Rent. You'll get everything you want out of this game in a week or so. It's not terribly long(17 levels I believe), but the later levels do get pretty tough so you won't breeze through it. It has virtually no replay value, and has no multiplayer of any form. I guess you could go through and look for all the weapon and stat upgrades, but they're pretty pointless.

Bottom Line: An extremely mediocre action platformer. Could have been so much better if the controls were tightened up and the camera wasn't so sloppy.

Reviewer's Score: 5/10, Originally Posted: 02/27/06