For the most part WayForward has kept me on as a happy customer, but this game somehow managed to have all the right pieces- just none of them seem to fit together quite right.
What could've been a wonderful homage to the games of yesteryear, winds up falling short. The show itself has the foundations built on 80's gaming and inventive usage of tons of old school referential humor- but none of them are utilized in the game. They don't even use any of the series regulars like High Five Ghost or Muscle Man. Even the simple inclusion of cameos beyond Benson's 20 seconds in the opener would have been an improvement.
There aren't even any voice acting snippets outside of the duo's "OOOOOOooooooohhh...". Where's all the quotes? Where's all the fan service that should be standard with a game based on a television show? None of the things that make the show great are present in the game. It missing the humor, the hilarious situations, and
As it is M&RAi8BL begins with gorgeous 16-bit graphics in a predictable platformer, and adds in some side-scrolling shooting, and top-down shooting like one of my old favorites Zombie's Ate My Neighbors! and swiftly goes downhill from there.
For the platforming- you can swith between the two major slackers Mordecai and Rigby with a button press. Rigby will be largely ignored when you don't need to squeeze through small areas because Mordecai gets a very useful double-jump- making him an obvious choice for nearly all situations.
In the side-scrolling shooter you play as a space ship version of Mordecai. It sounds great, but handles just a tad too awkwardly.
During the top-down shooting you get to play as Rigby. But shooting here is strangely off, it's a lot of strafing, but any changes to the direction of fire seems choppy and can lag that 1 second needed to result in one more cheap death.
On the whole the controls are both good (platforming) and aggravating (shooting).
Which brings me to my biggest issue, and possibly the games biggest flaw- a largely artificial difficulty level. Padding the very short length of the game by making a generically cheap difficulty isn't a good way to make a game.
There are 4 worlds, with 4 levels and a boss to end the area. The levels aren't particularly long, and have plenty of dead ends. Really there isn't a whole lot here- so it seems they ramped up the difficulty to add some game play time.
Challenge is one thing, cheapness is a another- and this game is rife with cheap challenges. Dying repeatedly due to off-screen enemies or terrible hit boxes (seriously, there's roughly a 50% chance you'll die jumping on an enemy head- if you aren't exactly centered, you die) doesn't help this game at all. It is very irritating, and becomes much more so as the game progresses because you only have a single hit point. Replaying levels after an enemy collision problem right at the end puts this game into a state of frustrating repetitiveness no one can enjoy. It feels like a constant stream of unfair deaths.
Even the collectibles section is disappointing- you collect golden VHS tapes and fanny packs. The tapes open a let-down of an art gallery, and a cheat codes section- and the only code I know of is for infinite lives (big surprise it's the Konami code)- fairly useless once I've beaten a game I know I'll never want to play again.
And as for the fanny packs... I still don't have a clue what they were for- it was never explained anywhere in game, and I didn't care enough to find out.
This game is mediocre at best, and that is coming from a huge fan of the Regular Show. WayForward has squandered this license- they've created what amounts to an uninspired and greatly missed opportunity. It looks and sounds good (the music is quite good), and it has ideas that might have been better applied, but all the ingenuity the show has is lost on the game.
Instead of buying this, just go watch the show, at least you'll be entertained.
Perhaps in time we'll get a game based on the Regular Show that will do it justice- updating all the nostalgic joy of the 8-bit era without the parts no one liked. Someone needs to properly tap into the show's creativity and give us a game the Regular Show rightfully deserves.
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