Waybackward. Way, waaaaaay backward.
Man, I can't tell you just how
disappointed I am with
Tak: The Great Juju Challenge. I've always considered Wayforward the Treasure of American developers, creating fantastic but short games, being able to come up with great gameplay
even when working under licenses. But this game is so poorly designed it ain't even funny, to the point that I wonder if it was even
tested.
This is a 2-D platform game in which you play as the Tak and Lok
duo, surprisingly, mostly as Lok since he has more tools. In the game, both characters team up to win some
sort of contest between villages. It translates in to 5 worlds, five stages each, made up of 3 platform stages, 1 boss and 1... racing mini-game. There's also a whole
slew of minigames you can unlock, such as surviving a certain amount of time. It's about 3 hours long, on par with what you'd expect from the system.
While Tak has been the protagonist of these games,
seems like the
Fonzi trope is in full effect, because Lok is the guy you'll be playing as the
most. When playing as Tak, he can shoot fireballs or, when separated from Lok, don a bird-suit that let's him fly. Meanwhile, when you play as Lok he can attack with his club, dash(By using Tak's magic to
propel him forward), use Tak's magic to create a shield above them, ground pound and, when separated from Tak, don a crustacean outfit that lets him walk underwater. What, you expected swimming mechanics?
Nothing so decent-budget here! If you touch water you die, but if you're
wearing said outfit you can walk and jump while underwater. You can swap your characters by pressing the R button, but you have to be
holding perfectly still or it won't work which is kinda annoying.
The controls in this game are really something
else. I was
accidentally triggering Lok's dashes every now and then because the game would register double taps. And, a rare few times, when I had to use the aerial dash, it wouldn't trigger! Regardless, I had my fair share of
ruined jumps due to this, well, that's the
least of the platforming problems, 'cause y'see, WayForward made the rookiest of rookie mistakes with this game:
The camera follows you. How's that an issue, you ask? Well, because you'll be losing track of the platforms you want to reach
every time you jump. This single issue
completely ruined the game and any kind of fun one could've had. Having to be careful with every single jump because of losing track of where I was trying to land got
tiring pretty soon.
The problems don't even end there, a TON of times I was at the
mercy of leaps of faith. Sometimes you'll just reach the end of the platform, and even if you try looking down it won't go far enough to show you if there
actually is something below you. There were a few standout levels that were even
worse than the others, the one with the rising water level is probably the worst level in the game, because just like it's impossible to see if there's ground beneath you, sometimes there's no way to tell if the water has risen or
not, so just drop down and hope for the best. You don't even get noise cues to aid you, there's nothing.
It's absolutely idiotic. Later in the game comes a snow level that has a falling ceiling, but there's no way to tell where there's a falling ceiling and where there isn't. Or I thought so at first, until I noticed the ground was different. Not that it mattered, because then you'll get mixed cues, for instance, a blue ceiling that looks as if it was part of the scenery, but the ground below signalling a falling ceiling. So you wait, and nothing happens. And you wait. And nothing happens. So you push forward, and a grey falling ceiling falls OVER the blue ceiling that was part of the environment.
What. The. Hell? It's not a hard game, it's a frustrating one, due to all these
oversights and rookie mistakes. It's not fun to play.
Then there are other tiny issues, like unskippable cutscenes, which are annoying because they are
boring and you have to sit through them if you run out of lives. Later in the game you come across shielded enemies that have to be shot at with Tak in order to break their shields, and then hit with Lok in order to defeat them.
Except that if you swap characters too fast their shields won't break. Thanks for nothing! Oh, and the racing stages?
Horrible. Sometimes it feels like
chance whether you win or lose, and, for whatever reason, whoever is in first place will get the Clock rather
frequently, which freezes every other races. This means that whoever is in first place and gets a clock will most likely keep that first place until the end of the race, because the huge advantage the clock provides.
Tak - The Great Juju Challenge is
easily one of the worst, if not
the worst, games I've played on the Gameboy Advance. The gameplay is disappointingly boring, but they coupled it with some baffling design choices, choices that
get in the way of platforming, the game's focus! And it's even more disappointing when you remember that WayForward made this game. WayForward put their logo on this game.
Why?
1.0 out of 10
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