Review #771: Disney's Lilo & Stitch(Gameboy Advance)

 It's Heavy Machine Gun time, yo!

 Full disclosure, I never watched the original film Disney's Lilo & Stitch is based on, nor have I ever cared about it, if anything, I always thought Lilo and Stitch were kinda lame. That said, during my Emulation days I remember coming across this game, and lo and behold, it was a Metal Slug clone. Who came up with that? Don't care, give'im a medal. That said, I never played past the first stage, otherwise I would've discovered that the game's got a bit more variety than that, something that becomes a bit of a detriment....

 I'm pretty sure it doesn't follow the plot from the movie, although it might follow an episode from the TV Series, I don't know. What you need to know is that Mosquito aliens kidnap Lilo and Stitch ventures out to save her. The game is made up of 7 stages, only 3 of them play like Metal Slug, as Lilo gets two stealth missions, Metal Gear style, finally, there are two tube-ship shooting stages, y'know, those pseudo 3-D on-rails forward-scrolling shooters. And yes, I did just look that up on Wikipedia, since I didn't know how they were called. On another note, the game looks gorgeous, character sprites are incredibly faithful to the source material, like something out of a SNES era Disney game.

 The Metal Slug stages are the best part about the game, and if those were the only stages in the game it could've been an easy 8. Stitch can jump and shoot, as well as chuck grenades, limmited ammo, with the R button. You can tank up to 4 hits before losing a life, and you can come across gun power ups that give you 50 wall-piercing super powered bullets. These parts can get a bit tough, but shouldn't take you more than a game over to conquer. The final boss is a bit cheap, with very unfair hitboxes, but that's the only bad part about Stitch's sections. The ship sections are passable and very, very forgettable.

 But the thing that really pushes the game down are Lilo's stages. They are boring and annoying, I must've lost over 20 lives on the first part alone. Just getting twice by most enemies will murder you, and there are some annoying slime-aliens that can insta-kill you by capturing you in a bubble. Some parts are downright unfair, in her second level there's a section of the stage you might enter running only to wake up a slime alien you just couldn't predict was gonna be there who will encase you in a bubble the moment you take a step to the left. There are alos green-tentacle aliens that are tough to avoid, eventually I figure the best way to do so was by running towards them and as soon as Lilo's arms touched them, jump over them. It worked quite well except for the few times they'd actually turn around and murder me. These parts have no checkpoints which only add to the tedium, losing on Lilo's stages means doing every single puzzle again, having to hold R to walk very slowly on some parts or having to wait for enemies to move so that you can ride while they have their backs towards you. I hated these parts.

 I wish I had better things to say about Lilo and Stitch, but then again, I also wish the Lilo stages weren't in the game, so there's that. The worst part about the game is how solid, if a bit too simple, Stitch's stages are, if they had spent more time developing those gameplay elements instead of biting more than they could chew it could've easily been a better game. In other words, the great parts about the game last too little and its worst parts feel like they last for too long.
 5.5 out of 10