Rugrats: Adventures in Gameland is a flawed throwback to platformers of days previous. Aesthetically, the groups at The MIX Video games & Wallride have completely nailed it. If you happen to grew up watching Rugrats, you’ll be swimming in nods to the cartoon, starting from characters, to environments, to props. And there is even a filter permitting the sport to remodel into an 8-bit treasure.
This side-scroller sees Tommy Pickles & associates accumulating cash to unlock a Reptar merchandise trapped in Tommy’s TV. You management one among Tommy, Chuckie, Phil, or Lil, all whereas swapping on the fly, a pleasant contact. They’ve separate well being swimming pools and completely different stats too, making swapping essential should you want somebody with a greater soar distance for instance.
Any nice platformer lives and dies by its controls, and that’s a problem right here. Primary platforming is satisfactory, however extra elaborate ranges name for climbing, leaping, and fight collectively, asking for a stage of precision the sport merely doesn’t have. Display screen transitions spawn enemies in a approach that enables for reasonable photographs earlier than you progress, they respawn too shortly, and the controls don’t deal with multitasking of fight and platforming properly. Climbing and merchandise manipulation undergo essentially the most right here, working poorly, or generally by no means. Boss fights generally tend to mix all of those elements into one, making issues even worse.
Fortunately, stage design is sweet, providing sprawling environments with quite a few secrets and techniques and alternate pathways. Plus the degrees really feel distinctive from each other. The kitchen has an industrial aesthetic, the attic extra of a haunted home, and so forth. They brilliantly take mundane, on a regular basis gadgets and extrapolate them into fantastical environs, very like you’d count on from the thoughts of a kid.
Cumulatively, you find yourself with a title brimming with nostalgia and good concepts, however controls that maintain the affair again.