While the gaming world shudders with the arrival of a new generation of consoles, the bitemap genre continues to behave as if progress has stopped somewhere at the junction of the 8 and 16 bit consoles. Though Scott Pilgrim vs The World: The Game – the game of 2010, it looks and is played as if it was launched on an old woman Sega mega drivethat does not spoil it in the least. Since the days Double dragon on NES the rhythmic beating of colorful punks from the side remains the easiest and most perky way to while away the evening with friends at one console.
The fate of Scott Pilgrim vs The World: The Game is a prime example of the imperfect digital distribution of games. The project left the open spaces PlayStation Store and Xbox live in 2014 due to publishing rights issues, and the disc version did not exist at all. For a long time, fans cried out to Ubisoft with requests to return the perky bitemup on the cult comics in the geek environment to the virtual counters. By the 10th anniversary of the game, the ice cracked, Scott Pilgrim reappeared on all relevant platforms, and the publisher threatens to release the game on physical media in the near future.
By all accounts, Scott Pilgrim vs The World: The Game is a classic representative of the genre. The hero, alone or with an armful of friends, moves mostly from left to right and thrashes aggressive punks. Fists, legs and all the items at hand are used. It should be noted that interactivity is one of the strongest aspects of the game. The streets are literally littered with various utensils: garbage bags, shovels, umbrellas, snowballs, baseball bats, katanas … What can we say, even knocked out opponents can be picked up and thrashed by them on the pressing hooligans! Just by kicking a bucket, you can knock the enemy down with it, but this trick works in the opposite direction. Enemies do not hesitate to pick up everything around and launch the player in the face, even if it promises bruises for their comrades. In the heat of battle, real bedlam occurs: while you are furiously waving a baseball bat surrounded by opponents, your friend launches a huge ice floe into the crowd, which, rolling, knocks down all opponents, you, and bouncing off the edge of the arena, also returns to the sender in the form blow to the ankle. Against this background, I would like to shame the developers of the recent Battletoads with a separate line, who did not even give a good old stick to wave for the whole game …
Opponents in the best traditions of the genre are strikingly different in battle tactics – someone is thicker than others, someone is more nimble, someone is trained in ninjutsu techniques, someone is in a Godzilla costume, and someone is a dog. The bosses arrange an extravaganza altogether – a girl with a katana cuts train carriages and sends illusions, a big man Tod Ingram first lets him have fun with a couple of his jealous girls (how to have fun … competition in the manner of Guitar Hero, and then organizes a massacre in the alleyway, wielding tentacles from nowhere.
The combat system is full of various subtleties and hidden mechanics, but all overshadowed by one nuance. The fact is that Ubisoft’s love for pumping and flying out numbers has for some reason spread here. If you set the difficulty level above the minimum, then you will inevitably face the need to farm coins and fill levels, passing the same missions several times. Coins are spent in local shops for various food and items that improve the performance of the hero. It is impossible to look at the bonuses of an item before buying, so you have to study the assortment by farming, trial, error and farming again. While the hero is naked like a falcon, the movements will be terribly slow, and the damage to ordinary enemies will be such that they will rise again 5-6 after the knockdown. Considering the inexorable growth of the parameters of opponents during the game, only switching to easy difficulty will help to evade the obligation in the form of monotonous swing.
But the most offensive thing is that without pumping the combat system itself will seem meager. Grabs with a throw, running strikes, kicks on prone enemies, parries and many other standard bitemap techniques open gradually. If after passing you decide to try another character, for example, Scott’s girlfriend Ramona, you will again be greeted by the first level, lack of money and the castrated functionality of the hero. Given that the list of moves for all six characters is minimal, this approach is only annoying. The game has a strict balance with a fully open moveset as in Streets of Rage 4 or pumping with minimal impact on the al’s balance Double dragon neon, hardly anyone would be upset.
