There is a lot to be said for looking pretty. It gets you noticed and sometimes that's enough to impress people. Comic Jumper is very pretty, it's also quite a good concept - bad comic book hero has to schlep as a guest star to earn money to reboot his franchise. In this instance though the demo shows you everything the game has to offer, and is in fact far more polished than the rest of the title.
There really isn't much love here when it comes to gameplay. The 'old school' vibe is present, but none of the care and attention. The gameplay is repetitive without ever being inventive. If you didn't live through the 8-bit era of 20 years ago you could be forgiven for thinking that this is how it was back then, but on the whole it wasn't. Developers took care over the smallest details of enemy placement and when you got hit you knew it was your fault and not just the fuzzy gameplay that you have in Comic Jumper.
There is no feedback to the player - often (esp comic 3) you are getting hit without any clear message that it is happening. Also you can't really tell that you are causing damage to the enemies. There is no audio clue, or rumble to suggest these, just the muddy visuals.
The muddy visual problem crops up with the pipes in comic 1, where it isn't clear that you can grip onto these, and in some case you can't even see the pipes.
Essentially you hold down the right trigger and spend the game pointing at the bad guys with the left stick. The game even includes an auto aim to help. I'm not sure who thought this was fun.
Melee sections are essentially one button combat, one button defence - even the Turtles arcade machine added a bit of variety. You can buy a melee power up that does absolutely nothing to change this.
The light gun sections have some of the worst reticule control of any game I have seen. I've played PS2 versions of light-gun games that had snappier control, and that was 10 years ago. Now the Wii has put quality light gun games in our homes it's worth the dev playing a few of those and stealing the play style if not the responsiveness.
You get a super Y button power attack that the game then penalises you for using. As far as I know it's always the same animation, but I only ever used it twice as it seemed to do nothing anyway. Maybe it's to speed up the monotonous bosses.
The sound-bites are funny, but tied to scripted events so that you get very sick of the ones for loosing health and dying. Should have at least varied these by comic. On the whole the presentation and the story is great, but it's let down by a terrible game.
The enemy placement is poor, there is no thought to what makes a good challenge. Nothing that involves the regular grunt enemies is memorable.
The bosses are essentially either the one in a frame where you shoot something in the centre, or the one where something flies around and you have to avoid the deadly lines. There is one unique boss near to the end. All have a giant number for you to whittle down by pointing at the boss and holding down the trigger. All are tedious, and most are repeated 2 or 3 times throughout the game. At least the developers didn't decide to add a boss rush mode at the end.
The RPG power up system adds nothing to the game, replaying the first level with a fully powered captain really doesn't change much. If this had been worked into the level structure then finishing a comic powered you up making earlier comics easier. This would have enabled the devs to fix the difficulty problems and guarantee a balanced game.
I like that buying the extras gives you bonus money. Unfortunately this breaks the high score tables as only those with 325% bonus will do well. Also whoever thought that buying 160 pieces of concept art one at a time, requiring 3 button presses and an animation, was a good idea should be punched hard. A bulk buy option where you buy a set value or number would have been better.
The repetition is mind boggling - all levels have the same things happen but with different sprites. Oh look - the flying things are attacking me while the round things roll across the bottom of the screen - on every single level. Sometimes you fight the same identical mini boss twice in a row. there are levels on the 3rd comic that feel identical but have different backgrounds.
There are two levels that are COMPLETELY IDENTICAL except that 2nd time around the mid level boss is at the end and is replaced with the games most interesting (and only unique) boss fight. Again, they spent time and effort on this boss, but forgot about the rest. Surely the difficulty and flow of the level should now be different due to the power ups and story development? No? Oh - ok...
The game is hard, but lacks challenge. Your deaths are always due to getting bored and trying to rush the level. Due to the poor design taking it slowly and only letting one or two enemies appear is the tactically best option which is probably why they added par times for the levels.
I loved the Maw - LOVED it. It's the best 3d PS one style game I've played. It filled me with hope for the developers future titles. This is just a big bag of trash. It's like they employed 100% of people that knew how to draw comic book style and nobody who knew how to make games, or had any experience of the notion of fun. The Q&A team got rid of all the bugs as it is a glitch free experience - it's just a shame none of them had the balls to tell the devs that the game wasn't any fun at all.
This is only for die-hard comic book fans who enjoy skill-less repetition. I think most people would be bored even watching a You Tube walk through of this titles levels and should stick to just the cut-scenes and first appearance of each boss.
The only other reviews on here are 4 or 5 star reviews, mainly talking about the start of the game and only hinting about it's flaws. Younger gamers may enjoy this title as while it feels hard due to the frequent deaths absolutely anyone can finish it. Also the collectibles aspect may encourage fans of Splosion Man to buy it for the extra 2 levels (bought for 5,000 money in the shop).
This is the worst XBL title that I have paid money for and if there was some way of getting a refund I would. I'm going to get the rubber band achievement for leaving the game running while firing shots (another example of not understanding what fun is) and then delete the stupidly large 2GB mess from my hard drive even though I don't need the space.
1 star represents the good presentation and ideas that the team had, maybe someday this will get remade with content that matches those aspirations and become worth playing. At the moment if someone offers you this for free turn it down.
