October 13, 2010, at 03:02 PM

Mini Review: The Smurfs Travel The World

The legendary Last Ever European SMS Game. (So far.) How bad can it be?

Graphics

The graphics are very reminiscent of the better NES games, in that they are trying very hard with small, matching palettes to do shading. But this is the SMS! We have 16 colour palettes, not 4! So it sort of looks like a badly colourised black-and-white photo, when it's doing the shading thing, and just crappy the rest of the time.

Most sprites are reasonably well done, cartoony as you'd expect but the pixels have all been pushed to the right places. Some are downright shoddy.

The ending has some pretty nice (although simple) graphical effects, although it's a shame they didn't expand it from the GG screen size.

Sound

Off.

Longevity

At the start you're offered two "continents" upon which to play. Each one has quite a lot of not-very-related stages that just feed on directly from one another, with a bit of variety between them. After you complete them, you get another

In each stage, you have to find a certain number of crystals. Most are in plain view, requiring some platforming to reach, and some are only available after you defeat certain enemies. There's a decent mix of platforming styles, including vertical stages and chase stages, although the majority is plain old wide-aspect-ratio platforming.

Plot

Collect the scattered magic crystals, yes... admirable videogame plotting... clean the planet of pollution by collecting rubbish? What? (Don't worry, that part is optional.)

Fun

It's so utterly generic that it's difficult to get very excited about it. Diverting, if you like that sort of thing, but really lacking the character needed to differentiate it from the early-90s platformer crowd.

Innovation

Not really.

Conclusion

Ultimately no more than you'd expect, and not entertainingly bad.


Mini Review Ratings