There's not a lot of things to complain about.
The game has great graphics, though the character sprites in J&M were more detailed. The art style is cool, though the backgrounds still seem to have Sonic the Hedgehog syndrome. The story is simple enough; save your cave woman from evil. But it seems that they tried to have sub-plots involving more evil characters without explaining where they came from or why they want your girl; none of it makes any sense. The ending is also awful since you just get a 'The End' screen.
The stage design in the game is very good overall. Each stage has something to it that will make you go "Ah cool, this is that level with the...", and the stage designs in general are very colorful, challenging, and memorable. However, there are some problems that keep it from being excellent. Lava and fire cause instant death, some stages have unavoidable traps that will kill you slowly, and some items will spawn or disappear when you leave the screen. Other than that, the game is really fun to play through. Some people might say that the game falls a little on the easy side, but I think the game only becomes easy once you play through it a few times. Kids will never beat the game, but once you figure out how to control Congo effectively and learn the attack patterns of certain enemies, you'll be able to search for secrets; and there's tons of them. The only problem is that extra lives are so easy to come by that it almost eliminates all difficulty. By the time I got to the last boss I had 50 lives in the bank! It just makes you lazy to try hard. It's also possible to die during a special stage, and most of them take you back to the beginning of the level afterwards. I don't know what they were thinking with that; it sucks.
One of the gameplay issues I found was that Congo is always centered in the middle of the screen, no matter how high you jump. There's many sections where you have to jump across a lot of small platforms over a pit of death, meaning you'll be forced to make too many leaps of faith without knowing what's below you. It really becomes a problem in the canyon world and in the last few levels, evolving them into trial and error until you memorize the stage layouts. Another problem is that there are some glitches that cause cheap deaths, as well as some strange design flaws. For example, I ran into a few areas where Congo will get stuck on walls, touch the side of a spike and die, or be in a situation where there's an enemy at an awkward angle on the platform beneath me that causes me to take damage because I couldn't squeeze in to attack properly. The boss difficulty is also immensely unbalanced. They don't seem to become sequentially harder as you progress through the game; sometimes they're ridiculously hard and sometimes they're a joke. 2 of them can be beaten by just standing in one spot and attacking constantly until they die, and 1 of them can be taken out in 1 hit if you're good. Others left me turning to walkthrough videos on the internet to figure out their spastic attack patterns. I also found 1 or 2 occasions where I will get hurt before an enemy finishes their attack animation. Weird.
Finally, they took out co-op! What on earth were they thinking? This game could have been great with co-op, but instead all you get is turn-based multiplayer with separate scores. You might as well be playing the game by yourself. That's my biggest gripe with the game; they fixed J&M perfectly except for taking out the best thing it had going for it. If they kept the same multiplayer system it would have been a lot easier to overlook the few flaws the game has.
Overall, Congo's Caper is a great game to add to anyones SNES collection. It's a fun platformer that controls great, has a lot of depth to the gameplay, has memorable stage designs, and expands the classic formula of J&M very well. Although it has a few flaws that keep it from being perfect, saying they are huge problems would just be nitpicking. The lack of real multiplayer is a huge disappointment, but I would definitely recommend this game to anyone that enjoys SNES platformers; and that's pretty much everyone.
- ac