WHACKED REVIEW (XBOX)

Adam Hall

Publisher: Microsoft | Developer: Presto Studios | ETA: Out Now | Price: £17.99 Inc VAT.

Introduction
I hated Myst, scratch that, I had a deep-rooted loathing of the monstrous excuse for a video game, so much so, that upon seeing just 1 second of it made me want to break the CD case into small shards and stab them into my eyes!
It was beyond me how some people found it exciting to look at still 3D renders over and over again only making progress by clicking on the odd item spread erratically around the screen! I was also thrown into disarray when Presto Studios kept on releasing them when it was clear that 90% of the world’s population would rather buy a grenade on the last second before detonation than purchase monotony itself! When they finally stopped coming out I unconfined a large sigh of relief as I wallowed in the fact that the world was now a better place, but as soon as Whacked arrived on my doorstep for review sporting the horrific Presto logo that I’ve had years of psychiatric help to try and forget, my jaw hit the floor! It might be an okay game, I thought, I’m used to living lies!

The premise of the game consists of battling it out with a bunch of innovative, but strangely annoying characters to reach the final ‘prize’ that’s different depending on whom you play as. On the way you unlock extra characters (and weapons) despite the fact that every one handles exactly the same way so your selection criteria is based purely on aesthetics. Using a large variety of weapons ranging from Staple guns to baseball bats, you have to pummel your foes to oblivion in an attempt to get the upper hand at completing the required task, which I might add, are the most ridiculous tasks I’ve ever come across in a party game, but more on that later.

Gameplay
The single player campaign of Whacked is (with no exaggeration) one of the most uninteresting games I’ve ever played. Not one time during playing did I think it had potential because every time I was standing on the green circle to reach the 2 minute target or trying to staple a chicken to the floor and collect the resulting stars only to have them smacked out of me merely seconds after, I couldn’t get the idea out of my head that the game isn’t going anyway. Most games like Halo, or Max Payne give you a target to work towards but Whacked seems to lack this. Of course there’s the final prize that I spoke of earlier, but I learnt to not care about it anymore and I’m sure you’d share a similar feeling. Throughout the game all I felt was ‘you’re playing this game for review’ not ‘you’re playing this game because it’s good’ and I think that’s quite terrible!

I love platformers, the 2D ones disappeared years ago and it’s a big shame, but now that we’ve got wonders like the Gameboy Advance, the genre is just kept in existence. Whacked could be described as a 3D platformer, but done badly! Yes there’s a platform, and yes you do jump around on it, but unlike decent 3D platformers, like MDK, Whacked gets boring in less than 10 minutes. Although there’s a varied selection of Characters to play as, none of them really caught my attention as someone I want to use; I just picked one so I could get on with the game (although I did have a look at Lucy for a bit!) They’re all a bit stereotypically comical and in this day and age, that just doesn’t pass anymore, we need subtle, deep and appealing characters! Well, I do!
Keeping platformers in mind, they may do the same thing over and over, but because they front such vast diversity in level design, you remain interested. Whacked appears to ignore this logic despite it being the most abundant philosophy of preservation within this type of game. When someone says ‘Whacked’ to me, I instantly think of going insane on a penguin in someone’s novelty large back garden with a baseball bat over, and over again, and THAT, is bad game design!

You read any review for this game and in a roundabout way, they will tell you that the Multiplayer is carrying this game. Single player is nothing short of terrible, so the party aspect of Whacked is the factor that keeps it on the shelves and in people’s houses. Saying that, the multiplayer side is nothing special either. It’s nice to be able to have 4 players on Xbox, but that’s irrelevant when the game they’re playing isn’t that fun to start with! It’s repetitive, shallow and annoying to cosmic levels.

Graphics
Most definitely the best part of Whacked is the way it looks, putting aside Lucy’s definitive nakedness, and how it reminds me slightly of 1996’s MDK, aesthetically, this blunder could look quite promising. As we know, though, it’s not all about graphics!
Textures are excellent, even close-up they remain intact and functional at creating a semi-plausible world! The only real criticism I have of the graphics in Whacked is that the player models don’t fit in when you’re actually playing. They seem somewhat super-imposed and although this may be as a result of them not having any rotate animation, it’s something I find quite distressing for a company that claims to be good at making games.
Despite this, the FMVs used to introduce and navigate the game throughout are very good if not overly stylized. Everything’s shiny and disproportioned, but that’s the ongoing gimmick that the game comes with so there should be no ill talk of that, irrespective of how strange it is!
It’s a nice effort, the game is presentable, but it’s blatantly obvious that the developer hasn’t made games like this all its time.

Posted by LNorton at October 20, 2003 07:13 AM