Game #1011: The Powerpuff Girls - Relish Rampage

 It's missing the chemical X.

  If you didn't watch The Powerpuff Girls your childhood sucks. If you did, and then in your adulthood you play The Powerpuff Girls: Relish Rampage then your adulthood sucks... hey! Wait a minute...

 Well, this game is even worse than I expected. First, the good. It's semi-open world, you play as one of the girls while the other two float behind you and do nothing. You can swap characters by pressing L3, but... there's no benefit. Buttercup has a different-looking projectile attack than the other two, but that's about it. Anyways, flying around town feels decent, and if you hold down R2 you'll fly very fast, and... it can be fun. While the girls fly, and you can increase or decrease their altitude with L1 and L2... you can't fly over buildings, so you are stuck to the streets, which is a bit silly, but, in a way, moving around while taking curves and the such doesn't feel half bad! That said, that's about the only good thing I could say about the game.

 For you see, even the intro when you start the game is lame. It's in-game footage of the girls flying around the the blandest tune ever composed. The game is semi-open world, but you always have an objective and you are guided towards it by a yellow arrow. Not all objectives are limited by time, but besides health pack there's no reason to explore town, there are very few collectibles, but they are worthless.

 The combat is SO bad. Not only is the range on your attacks pathetic, meaning you have to get obscenely close to your enemies to hurt them, but your special moves, like the eye beams, run on a cooldown. You can spend Chemical X bottles to use stronger moves, like a tornado or ice breath, but they aren't particularly useful, heck, you can get hit while spinning in tornado form, making it more of a hassle than anything else. But the real kicker is that the targeting system sucks. Sometimes the game wouldn't lock onto my enemies I don't know why. I'd go in circles around them mashing R1 to no avail, I think it had something to do with getting on the same altitude level as them, but I'm not sure. But even once you lock onto an enemy... there's no guarantee it'll be the enemy you wish to target! And there's no easy way to cycle between targets, just keep mashing R1 until you get the right one. Dumb!

 Wait, there's another good thing I can say about the game! It only lasts an hour and a half, and then you are done with this shovelware. Man, the Powerpuff girls deserved much better.

2.0