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He-Man: Power of Grayskull By: Haricot Vert aka Daniel Wang "By the power of Grayskull - I have the... mediocrity." Well, here we go again. By request, another licensed title of dubious quality.
Game Specs
After the Drake & Josh review was released, I was approached about doing this game for the next review. My anal sphincter clenched involuntarily at the thought of reviewing another syndicated-material game back-to-back. Although it was promising that many reputable gaming sites actually reviewed it, it was not so promising that they all seemed to agree it was just another inconsequential cartridge promoting the cause of free market capitalism. He-Man: Power of Grayskull had a release date that coincided with the 2002-2004 remake of the original 1983 He-Man animated series. As far as I can tell, the game is just another tie-in product alongside all the Mattel action figures that were meant for a very narrow market demographic of pre-teen boys that watched Cartoon Network, none of whom were even born when the original He-Man series aired. As a result, there is no "nostalgia" factor to this game, unless you were a pre-teen in 1983... in which case you would now be approximately 35 years old and probably not dabbling around with shitty Gameboy Advance games. For the record, let it be known that my knowledge of "Masters of the Universe" lore does not extend beyond Robot Chicken's lampooning of the franchise.
There is no real plot to this game, aside from a progression towards the final mission against Skeletor himself. Each mission is its own episodic playthrough of a preset Diablo-style level peppered with trash mobs, temporary powerups, locked doors, and a final boss of some kind. The first mission is more or less a tutorial, with the usual walkthrough narrated by a completely irrelevant character. There is no character better suited to this task than Orko.
The second mission is where things start getting bad. Whereas the tutorial was pitifully easy, mission 2 is no more difficult in design but ends in a bitchass fucking hard end boss. You have to rescue your pussy(cat) Cringer from some Skeletor flunky named Clawful. I can only assume this horrific mutant crab was recruited from the very pubes of Paris Hilton, judging by his super strengh and resistance to Permethrin treatment. Clawful is not how a game should start out, if only for pacing considerations. Maybe the clues to defeating him are in the manual or on GameFAQs, but for anyone that pops in the cartridge immediately after opening the box, Clawful is the hardest enemy you will encounter in the entire game, barring Skeletor himself.
Ultimately, I was able to beat Clawful only through sheer determination and patience. It's easy enough to figure out his attack pattern - it's identical to Boo of the Super Mario series of games. Except this means purposely exposing your ass to this guy, who has a longer proportional physical reach than Tayshaun Prince. Even getting touched by Crawful rapes you for about 1/6 of your entire health, and if you get too close to his reset point in the middle of the platform he will just chain-rape you. This means that the only method of defeating him is the following:
There is one particular problem compounding the difficulty of the game from here on out, which becomes noticeable only because the missions are no longer tutorial-level simple and require performing twitch-based actions beyond the capacity of a table grape. Simply put, the controls are impossible. Allow me to clarify that statement: there is absolutely nothing wrong with the button commands themselves. They are extremely standard: B-button = standard sword swing, A-button = jump, L-button = run, R-button = block, A + B = jump attack, hold B = strong sweeping attack. Those are all fine. The problem is when you push those buttons in an effort to execute your attack/leap/block, the results are practically random. Timing, placement, orientation, landing, and aiming are all irrelevant in the land of Eternia; you may as well just close your eyes, mash buttons, and pray the game decides to have mercy on your soul. Even after a couple hours of playing the game, the controls always feel clunky and unreliable, no matter how many times you encounter the same formulaic enemy or platform jump. To say that controlling He-Man is frustrating would be an understatement. It gets to a "punch-a-fetus-in-utero" level of aggravation once the hit-and-run enemies show up.
Adding to the clusterfuck of a design choice is the "ouch" recovery animation that He-Man goes through whenever injured - an animation that both you and enemies have - the difference being that enemies become immune to further attacks during their animation, while He-Man is vulnerable to damage before his recovery animation completes. Furthermore, if He-Man simultaneously attacks an enemy just as they attack him, it counts as a stalemate and neither is damaged nor deals damage. This is true for all of He-Man's possible attacks - even his "charge-up whirlwind" attack will not override the basic attack of most enemies. You'll hear a little metal-on-metal "clang" sound with no effect. It is unclear whether the designers purposely integrated this into the combat system in an effort to evoke "realism" or to make the game hard enough that you can't waltz through it spamming the B-button. In either case, their implementation is flawed and rife with bugs.
Mission 3 grants you a respite with a Shoot 'Em Up-style scroller with you riding Battle Cat and firing lasers. It's little more than a bonus level that gives you the opportunity to get an extra life if you collect all the crystals. It's not difficult at all despite the damage you take from running into obstacles. Later on in the game, there are 2 other Missions that involve this same shmup format, and are just as easy (if not easier) since you end up flying on a giant dragonfly thing.
Speaking of which, the game encourages you to "collect all the crystals" in each standard mission. If you do, you get to play a speed-run minigame at the end as a chance to get an extra life. What puzzles me is that the game takes such great pains to track your mission progress, enemies killed, and crystals collected through its password system, but you gain nothing for doing so. Even after beating the game with full completion, there is no special achievement, no special ending, no unlockables. The game has zero replayability, period.
Beyond this, it's hard to find anything good about the game. Once I learned to anticipate the game's terrible bugs and swatting at enemies in unintuitive ways, there's not much else left of the game to save it. The level design is uninspired and monolinear - there are no "alternate routes," no puzzles harder than "find the key/button." I'd speak more about the rest of the bosses you fight, but as already mentioned there are none harder than Clawful. The fight with Skeletor is equally frustrating but I'll leave it up to you to find the gumption and sanity to beat him yourself.
The following is just a small sampling of the bugs freqently encountered in the game, ranging from the mildly annoying to the game-ending:
This game sucks. It is boring. It is buggy. You die because of stupid combat mechanics. And unlike Drake & Josh, the game is based on a franchise that never experienced true success and widespread popularity (Drake & Josh has repeatedly won the Nickelodeon Kids' Choice Awards). There is some semblance of a game buried somewhere under its rough, unpolished exterior, but it would take a lot of refining and perhaps a total revamp of the game engine to get it to a state that is actually enjoyable, challenging, fair, and fun. Once you unlock and complete each mission, there is no reason to go back and replay them except for Guantanamo "enhanced interrogation" purposes. There isn't even a "nostalgia" factor that makes it an appealing buy for someone who wants to relive their childhood: even on eBay, this title does not sell for less than $10. With that thought, let us end on the following note:
Final Arbitrary Quantification - Haricot Vert |
