Luigi’s Adventure
Michael (Admin) | Sep 4, 2009 Games
(1 votes, average: 2.00 out of 5)
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I featured Luigi’s Adventure in a recent newsletter [subscribe] because I have a certain admiration for small developers who try to dive into the 3D shooter market. Plenty of these games are ambitious but, in the end, they suck the big one for various reasons.
Crazy Monkey Software’s entry in this tough genre doesn’t completely suck, but it’s definitely not wowowow great either. Your job is to get this fruitcake named Luigi out of the spaceship where he’s being held captive and back home… apparently his captors have a lot of robots running around, and in Luigi’s world these robots occasionally drop diamonds when you kill them. Collecting these diamonds open doors that lead to your escape, and if you collect enough of them you “win” the game.
The reason I’m calling Luigi a fruit is because (a) he wears a t-shirt with a big L on it, like Laverne from Laverne & Shirley, and (b) he’s a guy who wears pink Chuck Taylor hightops with flood pants that are so short they’re practically knickers. I’m no fashion critic, but yeah, this guy’s got problems.
I wouldn’t mess with him, though, because he’s a fruit who knows how to handle a gun… while he’s standing still, that is. Running around the relatively small 3D environment while simultaneously shooting down enemy machines is nearly impossible, so to have any prayer of killing them you have to just stand in one spot and hold down the Fire button until they die. Of course, when you’re standing still you’re a sitting duck for the five other robots who want to murder you for your crimes against fashion so you can’t stand there for too long. Eventually you’ll want to run off and look for a health powerup to restore your health meter and, if you’re lucky, you’ll find some ammo and weapons upgrades along the way. If you can’t find the powerups you need, try standing on a blue teleport thingy to move to a different (but mostly the same) room where you might be able to get what you want.
And that’s pretty much the whole game: kill robots, find powerups, kill more robots, pick up diamonds when they appear, and try not to die. Controls are about what you’d expect from a game like this with an onscreen joystick controller on the left and the fire/switch weapon buttons on the right.
Luigi’s Adventure has the potential to be a pretty good game if the environments get bigger and some kind of weapons targeting were to be implemented, but in its current state it’s just ok. Standing still and shooting robots in the face gets pretty old pretty quick, but unlocking weapons like the flamethrower and laser gun make things a little more interesting if you can get that far. The background music is also pretty good but naturally this game doesn’t support iPod music (for some reason games like this never d0), and there’s a scoreboard but it isn’t global.
For $.99 I’d say go ahead and pay it if 3D gaming is your purpose in life, but temper your expectations and hope Crazy Monkey has some updates in store to make it more playable.
iTunes Link – Luigi’s Adventure
Version 1.0
Reviewed on iPhone 3G OS3.0.1
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- If you've got an Uzi I guess you can wear whatever color shoes you want
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- Luigi likes it Hard, wink wink
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- I think it's safe to assume Luigi doesn't have a girlfriend
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- Damn these robots, can't they see Luigi's trying to kill something??
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- Hmm, how does Luigi get all the goodies inside the energy fence?
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- If things on this level aren't working out, get the hell outta dodge via teleport
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- Dressing like a fruit angers robots like nothing else
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- That's right, I'm Luigi's mom
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- One screen of Help is pretty much all you need
(4.80 out of 5)