REVIEW – The game nobody wanted. A return that nobody expected to happen. And still, whatever will be written under the lead will not be only focusing on the newest game, as only talking about it would be lacking character-wise both in Word and on the page. Thus, I switched the original expectations around…

 

So… Bubsy. Those who weren’t born around the nineties are likely not knowledged about this bobcat, maybe with the PlayStation 1 installment in the series. Michael Berlyn’s character has a bit of background story, which makes the recap a bit, should I say, spicy.

The past

1993. Bubsy surfaces on the SEGA Mega Drive/Genesis and the Super Nintendo Entertainment System in Bubsy in Claws Encounters of the Furred Kind. Let’s not beat around the bushes: Accolade‘s game can be simply described as a Sonic the Hedgehog clone. Instead of collecting rings, the red exclamation point on the T-shirt wearing bobcat had to find yarn balls. It wasn’t a gigantic success, to say the least, and this statement can be applied to many Sonic clone animals with their alliterating names. (Okay, fine, Gex at least survived until the PS1 – hey, Crystal Dynamics, how about reviving him? Crash is back, too… and Aero the Acro-Bat wasn’t a terrible game, either. Awesome Possum on the other hand… let’s not go there.)

One year later, Bubsy 2 followed, mostly due to the critics’ supportive reviews for the first game. The sequel also launched on the Game Boy along the SNES/SMD duo, and it came with some additional gameplay elements: you could acquire some extra items by collecting cards. Although it now offered two-player gameplay and slightly less linearity than before, as well as the ability to use a Nerf gun, there was still a bit of lack of originality, and the game was still hard-to-follow fast. (In defense, the Game Boy version is alright in my opinion.)

This point is where the story starts taking a twist: in December 1994, Bubsy entered the Atari Jaguar, where Imagitec not only managed to screw up the exclamation point on his shirt (red in the options menu where he’s about to die, to be fair; yellow in-game), the gameplay remained questionable in quality. The cards were also gone. One step forward, one step backward!

In November 1996, Sony’s PlayStation, SEGA’s Saturn, and the Nintendo 64 were fighting for success. On October 31 of that year, the next Bubsy game, Bubsy 3D: Furbitten Planet arrived. If I had to describe it with one word, PEGI’d give this bunch of characters an M rating. The controls were tank-like to the max, the music was pretty much annoying, the graphics looked ridiculously basic, and the funny thing is that it was made by a studio that is now working on the PlayStation 4-exclusive Days Gone. Yep, this was made by SIE Bend, known as Eidetic back then – their first game was a mess, but they turned around big time with their next project, Syphon Filter… and there was also a SEGA Saturn port planned for Bubsy 3D. It got canned, as you’d expect, as Bubsy ran into a wall for the fiftieth time while turning. It’s respectable that they tried a 3D game, which was rare in ’96 (Mario pulled it off, though). In November 2015, the second game was launched on PC as Bubsy Two-Fur. Nobody knew something else might happen…

The present

…but it did. On October 31, the 21st anniversary of 3D’s launch, the PlayStation 4 and the PC received Bubsy: The Woolies Strike Back, published by Accolade. It could have been good – the dev team was Black Forest Games, who was behind the return of Giana Sisters. Giana Sisters: Twisted Dreams was a great game, and after the original Commodore 64 game, Chris Hülsbeck returned as the composer. (I could jokingly call him as the German Rob Hubbard, albeit he didn’t do a lot, but they are mostly memorable. Look up Turrican’s soundtrack.) Hülsbeck also participated in Bubsy, and even the Accolade name made a return – this company’s last game on its own was Redline on PC in 1999. (For me, the Test Drive revival in the late 90s was memorable… although those titles were nothing like the originals.) Bubsy’s question stands: „what could possibly go wrong?” This was asked multiple times in the franchise’s cartoon pilot, which, fortunately, didn’t evolve into a complete series.

Let’s talk about the game as well after one and a half pages. (The recap was sponsored by my seemingly dead hard drive, which cut me off from both music production and mostly video editing as well! Praise Hitachi!) What’s The Woolies Strike Back‘s story? The Woolies, the main antagonists for much of the series, have stolen Bubsy’s golden yarn ball and Bubsy is set out to get it back. That’s all. There’s a tutorial level. Do you need it? Not really. So, Bubsy is still capable of gliding, allowing him to traverse big gaps, just as in former games. He can also do a pouncing attack, which makes him jump up a bit, and, to be honest, I barely used it, as that little jump makes aiming quite a menacing task. That’s all. There are hundreds of yarn balls and a few keys scattered throughout the levels, while the middle of the screen in the bottom shows how much time you have spent on the stage so far. If you want to collect everything, go ahead – I don’t see any reason to do so, though.

If I had to think about positives, I’d be hard-pressed to say anything else outside Hülsbeck’s music. Negatives? Oh, this is where the gonzo journalism steps in: you can complete the game blind in one and a half hours, or even less. The map consists of a single screen. I think there were fourteen stages. Deduct the tutorial and three boss fights. The final „normal” level can be done in less than two minutes. With collecting everything, you can max out the game in less than three hours, and there’s no Platinum trophy either… all for thirty dollars/euros! 30 bucks for a game with no replayability! Boss fights: you have to pounce the UFO a few times, which is… just average, and not boring. (Hey, it could be positive!) I think the jumps are problematic – you might quickly run out of the nine lives as they are quite sensitive. Also, forget about the backgrounds in a few minutes, as you’ll only see three types of them – the forest, the desert, and the space ship. I could also bring up Bubsy’s voice, but since you can turn it off at any time (and you should, as it will be grating in a few minutes with lines that could be repeated several times in just one minute!), I’m just mentioning it.

The future

Bubsy: The Woolies Strike Back is just a dumb, downgraded Giana Sisters clone. It is overpriced, short, and it has the balls to say that Bubsy will return! Oh god, please no – only if Bubsy 3D 2 ends up being created, as this 2.5-dimensional platformer (side-scroller with 3D objects) is ridiculous, not worthy of its price. I’m not even recommending it if you get it for free. If this game was intentionally made to be bad, then well done, but I still believe Bubsy’s latest title is one of the worst games of 2017. I’m giving it a 3.8 out of 10 because if it launched for just ten bucks, it might have been a 5 out of 10… but no! And guess what? This game got a physical release on PlayStation 4 while Sonic Mania didn’t!

Please, take your thirty dollars and buy something else. For example, Sonic Mania, Cuphead, Shovel Knight, or even Rogue Legacy. You have plenty of options, and you may even acquire two of these games with much more gameplay and. My second playthrough took 33 minutes.

-V-

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Publisher: Accolade

Developer: Black Forest Games

Genre: Side-scrolling platformer

Release date: October 31, 2017