Game #1023: Franklin's Great Adventures

  And I thought the other Franklin game was slow as a turtle....

 Man, what is it with Franklin that he gets these slow as molasses platformers? Well, it seems I like to torture myself, because here I am again, this time facing the horror that is Franklin's Great Adventures.

 This game takes after the PS2 game I played recently, being a mixture of a platformer but also having various simple and boring minigames to play. Minigames are all kinds of dumb, like sorting items, flying a kite(In which you only need to mash A, that's the whole minigame), etc. And as you unlock minigames in the Story Mode, be it by 'purchasing' them on the overworld from NPCs or by finding every collectible in a stage you'll then be able to play them by themselves from the main menu, but why would you?

 The platforming sections could've been fun if only there weren't so slow paced. By the second or third stage, Franklin will be joined by one of his friends, either Bear or Beaver, and they each have different abilities. Bear can climb on certain stairs and Beaver can swim, as well as push floating platforms. Then the game quickly turns into a puzzle platformer, in which you must figure out how to get to different switches and how to activate them. The problem is... it's SO slow. Say, you might walk with Franklin a long stretch only to figure out that it was Bear who should've gone that way, so now you must slowly backtrack to were bear is, since you probably left him at the fork, take the OTHER path with Franklin and then swap control to Bear and go back through your first steps. And you might need to think how to solve the puzzle, by moving around, which is also so slow and therefore boring.

 And that's all I have to say. The switch-based puzzles aren't half bad and the graphics are pretty good, but the game is slow to the point of boredom, and that's what killed any enjoyment I could have gotten out of the game.

2.0