Reviewed by CL on 3/5/2006
This is a somewhat difficult review to write. Everyone else seems to really enjoy this game, but for some reason, I just couldn’t really ever get into the game. One problem might be that this is the first Viewtiful Joe game that I’ve played, so I’m not sure what the whole series is really about. This game comes across as a pretty standard side scrolling beat-em-up game. To spice things up, you have powers called VFX powers which are either activated by buttons or by performing certain motions on the touch screen. Some of these include a slow-motion power and the ability to split the screen in half by swiping horizontally across the screen with your finger or the stylus. Although these touch screen activated abilities might sound cool, in practice, they’re actually kind of annoying. The reason is that you have to take your fingers off the controls in order to activate them. Doing this in the middle of a battle is likely to result in some cheap shots as you are trying to make the motion with your finger. This leads to another annoyance, you end up getting your screen all smudged up because you’re constantly jabbing at it with your finger since there isn’t enough time to quickly grab the stylus.
Another down-side of this game is that it is ridiculously easy. You have to ability to easily dodge attacks by pressing either up or down on the directional pad. However, you never really have to do this because the enemies almost never attack. If you actually want to use this dodging ability, you actually have to stop punching the bad guys and wait a second or two just standing in front of them before they take a swing at you. This makes it way to easy to just breeze through any given level. This was a surprise to be since the other Viewtiful Joe game were suppose to be pretty hard.
In addition to this, the presentation is absolutely horrible. You can’t replay any levels without starting the entire game over. Also, you’re given three lives at the start of the game. Naturally, I assumed that if you were to ever lose a life, you would simply start over at the beginning of a level or the beginning of a stage. No! This is not what happens and you have to start the entire game over. That means you have three lives to beat the entire game. Luckily, as I mentioned above, the game is a breeze and this isn’t really a problem. Combine this with a clunky cut scene engine and one of the corniest stories that I’ve ever seen makes it somewhat hard to recommend this game. If you’re looking for a mindless fighting game that you can play for 10 minutes at a time, you’ll have some fun with this game, but if you’re actually looking for an engaging experience, this isn’t it.
