Joe Danger review

Joe Danger is the first game from new British company, Hello Games. It is a game of two halves; on one side we have a straightforward stunt racing game giving you the reigns of a stunt driver called Joe Danger. The other side is a level-editor, which is described as ‘easy-to-use’ (like most other games nowadays) but this one actually works in a very easy and straightforward way.

As I said this is the first game from Hello Games, so how actually is Joe Danger? Well, Joe was a world loved stunt rider who had fallen on hard times after he had an accident which broke all the bones in his body. But now, he is making a comeback to claim the Master of Destruction title that is the top accolade for the daredevil circuit, which has eluded him so far. The set-up is something of an odd-ball one, but it makes up for some great gaming fun. The basic gameplay elements are simple to use, you just press the left stick to control your balance and aerial rotation, X gives you a boost with L2 and R2 acting as brake and accelerate. Hitting the shoulder buttons makes Joe trick out Pure style. Boost is the key in the later stages of the game, in the beginning you will be just using it to get you a little higher on that jump but the later stages require you to use the boost to get over shark pools and move through spike-filled tunnels. The controls are tight and give you a good amount of command over what Joe does. The controls ease of use helps the game feel fresh and fun each time you play. While it does have a similar theme with each level, where you need to string tricks together to hit the leaderboard and the high scores needed to move onto the next level. But levels are varied by giving you various bonuses to collect, these include stars (of which there are varied amounts for each level) and there are also coins to dash for. These add to Joe Dangers sense of pull and make you just want to complete the game over and over. For hitting those high scores Joe nets gold star points, these points are then used to buy access to the next set of events, the way the game is structured you don’t need to get every star available in each event meaning that you don’t need to repeat any levels that you don’t want to. This gives the game even more appeal as you never feel like your pressed into playing over again but you know that you will. Tour events cost a maximum of three stars to unlock, at the beginning most cost just one, the events themselves reward between two and eight stars if all the challenges are completed. The challenges themselves consist of collecting all the coins in the level and completing a set amount of tricks without breaking your string. At the end of each level there is a leaderboard that is tied to your friendslist instead of a worldwide one. This adds to the idea of one-upmanship of the game as you can track how well your friends are performing in the game and it sets a target for you to hit. The only way to reach the top of the leaderboard is by stringing your tricks together to gain a multiplier, this multiplier increases for every successfully completed trick you pull off. The points are handed out for new and aerial tricks, you get a diminished return if you repeat too many tricks over the course of a level, so really you need to keep it fresh again like that of Pure. As mentioned at the start, there is also a track editor system that allows you to create your own track, which is introduced during the course of the single-player mode. In this mode you are able to create your own short courses, but that isn’t the important part. Within the editor mode you create as you go along in a style akin to LittleBigPlanet. The mode allows for you to make your own course anyway you wish to and then you can upload it to the PSN for others to download and try out. There is even a feature to allow you to message someone on your friendslist your track for them to try out. But there is no public search functions nor is there a way to make your track visible to those outside of your circle of friends. This is a serious limitation, as while the tools of the design mode are robust there is little incentive to actually design anything if only a small amount of people are going to see it. There is a local multiplayer experience but it is rather lacking as you can only race in two-player mode and there is only a selection of six courses to compete on, which is excluding any that you actually build yourself. The multiplayer doesn’t offer any other modes different from the main game so you have just straightforward races. There is very little drive to actually compete in this arena as there is just a massive lack of options here, if we had some other options like that of score challenges within multiplayer it would have expanded the mode. Joe Danger is something that is enormous fun to play in single-player mode and the friendslist based leaderboards does give you new set of challenges. The visual cartoony style of the game adds to the great flavour of the game with some brilliant touches, like that of the kaboom as you explode into small pieces after hitting a bomb or the great animation as Joe tries to swim away from a shark in the shark pool. There is some serious potential here, it feels good to play and there is some very compelling gameplay in there that just makes you want to play until you have beaten everything. But the multiplayer options do bring the game down; with a game like Joe Danger it seems strange that multiplayer looks to have played second fiddle to the single-player. A good first game from an up and coming developer, but some room for improvement for the sequel.

Rating: 8/10

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