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An unimpressive liscened game. As expected.
Publisher: Activision
Sat, 10 December 2005
by: Australian Ninja
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Shrek Super Slam [Triple S] is the kind of game that makes you want to pack up your home and move far far away just so you never have to see it again.
I want to say that Shrek has a really cool game based on the Super Smash Brothers formula - but if I did that I would be lying. In reality Triple S is a game that had the potential to be fun. But somewhere along the way it fell in with a bad crowd, you know the type - the big bad wolf, and that old crone that lured in the kids with her gingerbread house so she could eat them. Triple S fell in with this crowd and as a result it became "bad" but not a cool or kitsch kind of bad. I'm talking about just plain bad. SSS looks and smells like a Super Smash Brothers or Powerstone type of game, but it does not play like one. Though it does a pretty good impression at times.
Where to start? Well, the single best feature of Triple S is the imaginary story cut scenes. "Medieval Chef" being my favourite - a parody of Iron Chef with Shrek as Chairman Kaga and the unwilling Donkey as the secret ingredient.
Some of game modes on offer include; Story Battle, Challenge mode, Practice and Multiplayer.
 | | Many a man has been defeated by the "puss" |
Story Battle sees Shrek telling imaginary stories from a kid's book that allows all sorts of crazy themes to play out in the cut scenes. My other favourite cut scene fight intros were: The Wild West saloon face off between Gingerbread Man and Puss-in-boots; and the Gangsta Rap Gingerbread Man who shows us his house including the giant gumball machine and gingerbread car with license plate "2 SWEET." The cut scenes are damn funny. Subsequently the gameplay was a big let down after such cool intros.
Challenge Mode is an excellent mode (my beef is with the gameplay itself) filled with all manner of challenges pretty much like Super Smash Brothers on Gamecube.
Perform a certain number of throws, beat this opponent in under two minutes with "slam" attack, all hits are power hits etc. Standard stuff.
Medals are earned but man are they boring. A medal that is only text with no medal is kind of lame. Unless I missed the actual medal? I mean I looked in the museum and didn't see any physical medals, just stats.
Practice and Multiplayer are self explanatory - up to four simultaneous players if you are curious about that.
Now, strangely enough the controls work fine. The backgrounds look ok and the combos work every time. No problem here. The main thing is that the game is not fun and at times the game cheats, it goes from too easy to too hard. Strangely there are no selectable difficulty levels. The special moves are not particularly effective; sometimes the only thing I could hit the game with was the unblockable throw. There are combo hits, but nothing that useful.
The camera is hopeless, most of the time it is too far away to see what is going on. If you play it on a smaller TV screen then it becomes almost unplayable. But wait, none of those things are particularly bad on their own.
The real deal [with Bill McNeil] is that Shrek Super Slam is not fun to play. Generally for a game to be good it needs to be fun and have solid gameplay. Not the case here as after about three hours of playing Triple S the fun left the room. I chased the fun for a bit, then gave up and then made a groaning sound not unlike Comic Book Store Guy on the Simpsons would make.
The sound effects are kind of flat. I thought the bowling mini-game was fun but then I remembered that was in another game I played recently and my respect for Shrek fell just a little more. The music is partly enjoyable and partly annoying. Nothing to jump up and down about anyway.
Shame, as an animated / kids type of theme deserves crazy music and over the top sound effects. Shrek's butt attacks would be the perfect excuse to add comical farting noises into the game. Unfortunately this opportunity was missed. Perhaps you can make one yourself for your own amusement?
Fact: I like Shrek. I love the first film and I even own an action figure of Shrek. I wanted to like this game but my gamer's instincts kicked in and said "Boy, this game stinks worse than one of them big green gassy Shrek farts."
The thing that I kept saying to myself was "If they just copied the best stuff of Super Smash Brothers, this would have been a cool game."
A multiplayer SSB style game with the Shrek theme is a swell idea. The characters are varied and interesting, the attacks look all right, the extra costumes are sweet; particularly Gingerbread Man in his Wild West and Gangsta Rap threads.
 | | Fly, fatass, fly! (thanks Mallrats, this is the second time I've used that line) |
Certainly, all the potential of a fun game was there. The ideas were good but the execution of those ideas was poor.
Don't get me started on how the game looks as while the visuals are reasonable, and the character models are nice the in game camera ruins all of that by obscuring things and being too far away to see anything properly.
I don't know why it looks so plain as generally most PS2 games at this point look spectacular. It looks more like a first generation PS2 game.
It's Shrek Jim, but not as we know him! Sadly this is not the first [and probably not the last] licensed Shrek game. What I'm saying is that Shrek Super Slam is a good idea on paper but in the real world it's yet another crappy licensed game. If a bit more time had been spent on it, it could have been more fun. I didn't find any particularly big problems aside from being boring and having a useless camera.
The people most likely to buy this game are parents, the kind who will not be reading this review and will be unaware of the games' poor quality. The kids will play it because it's Shrek and they won't complain like I do. They will probably scream with giddy excitement and enjoy themselves mashing those buttons while that green thing on screen runs around getting beat up. I wanted to at least recommend the game for kids, but it's too bloody hard for most kids.
But the people who play it will most likely be kids and that is about the only use I think for Shrek Super Slam game. Unless you need more drink coasters – in that case go buy ten copies right now.
Sammy's note: Just in case you can't tell from Aussie Ninja's review here- Shrek Super Slam is intended as a children's game. While I think he did explain his reasons for disliking it well, kids are unlikely to care so much about those issues and will probably be happy enough just to have all the colourful Shrek characters to watch and play around with. Parents with young Shrek fans sharing their homes should probably rent the game and see if their kids get into it.
by: Australian Ninja
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More articles by Australian Ninja
"You face certain doom. Don't come this way. Go back. Beware, Beware!" Licensed cash cow sense... tingling. | |
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