Rugrats: Adventures in Gameland Overview (PS5)

Rugrats: Adventures in Gameland is a flawed throwback to platformers of days previous. Aesthetically, the groups at The MIX Video games & Wallride have completely nailed it. For those who grew up watching Rugrats, you’ll be swimming in nods to the cartoon, starting from characters, to environments, to props. And there is even a filter permitting the sport to rework into an 8-bit treasure.

This side-scroller sees Tommy Pickles & associates amassing cash to unlock a Reptar merchandise trapped in Tommy’s TV. You management considered one of Tommy, Chuckie, Phil, or Lil, all whereas swapping on the fly, a pleasant contact. They’ve separate well being swimming pools and completely different stats too, making swapping necessary in the event you want somebody with a greater soar distance for instance.

Any nice platformer lives and dies by its controls, and that’s a difficulty right here. Primary platforming is sufficient, however extra elaborate ranges name for climbing, leaping, and fight collectively, asking for a degree of precision the sport merely doesn’t have. Display screen transitions spawn enemies in a method that permits for reasonable pictures earlier than you progress, they respawn too shortly, and the controls don’t deal with multitasking of fight and platforming properly. Climbing and merchandise manipulation endure probably the most right here, working poorly, or typically by no means. Boss fights tend to mix all of those facets into one, making issues even worse.

Fortunately, degree design is sweet, providing sprawling environments with quite a few secrets and techniques and alternate pathways. Plus the degrees really feel distinctive from each other. The kitchen has an industrial aesthetic, the attic extra of a haunted home, and so forth. They brilliantly take mundane, on a regular basis objects and extrapolate them into fantastical environs, very like you’d anticipate from the thoughts of a kid.