Madagascar Escape 2 Africa is one game you wanna miss.
Madagascar Escape 2 Africa is nothing like the movie. Though I did say that the movie was only a little over average, it did have it's funny moments. Well, nothing of the story is remaining in this cheap game. The story is incredibly simple and you won't laugh about the game at all. Except about how pathetic this game is.
The story is one of its least problems, though. The game looks pretty ugly. It's not a terrible looking game, but the graphics are pretty muddy. The overall presentation of the game actually is a pretty big mess. The cut scenes are pretty terrible, if you can call them cut scenes, which makes the story just worse. The Characters look also awful. With awful animations. And if I say awful, then I mean awful. The music is also just as forgettable as the rest of the game. The voice acting is decent believe it or not, since it's the voice acting of the real movie, but for that the writing is pretty bad, of course, and the voice clips are atrocious.
Madagascar's biggest problem however relies in its gameplay. The gameplay blends boring and frustrating level design together in a way you'll stop playing this game after the first quarter of the game, if you haven't stopped playing the game even earlier.
The game does let you play as Alex, Marty, Melman and Gloria, which all have special abilities, which you learn by progressing in the game. These special abilities add to the game and do include sometimes new ways on how to fight your way through a level. But since the rest of the game is so bad, this doesn't even matter anyways. The levels still stay incredible generic.
The game only has you jumping from one platform to the next one and beating lame enemies like fat tourists or tourists with cameras that make your character dizzy if they shoot a foto. I can't decide between what is worse: the button smashing fighting or the boring and frustrating platforming.
The levels are very linear and incredibly uncreative. The levels also lack any variety, as almost every level plays and looks like the one before. There are a few exceptions, like when playing with Gloria where you encounter a few levels where you swim down a lake and have to avoid obstacles. And then there are very rare levels with the Penguins. But that's it. That's far not enough to make the gameplay anything near interesting. It's also dull how the levels are divided: Almost after every platforming section your way gets blocked by wooden fences which only disappear after you've beaten all the enemies that appear out of nowhere. And then you encounter another platforming section. And that's the whole cycle of the game. It's just tiring. The checkpoints are also pretty badly distributed. Which leads us to the next big problem of the game: It's frustrating level designs.
The levels are designed to frustrate, that's how it feels. The challenge is about getting your jumps right, most of the time. Levels have platform sections where your jumps are just long enough to make it to the tip of the edge of the platform you're trying to reach without falling into a pit. So if you don't get your jump perfect you fall into the pit. Platforming also requires very precised platforming, which is problematic with the D-Pad. The controls are okay for the most part, but the D-Pad isn't responsible enough for the level requirements. And for such precised jumps. The fighting sections on the other hand don't give up any challenge at all, so on top of all it gets pretty unbalanced.
It's simple: the game is boring, repetitive, generic and even frustrating. It's presentation is poor, but the gameplay is absolutely awful. Poor level design mixed with ugly and always the same looking environments, and a bad story mixed with poor cutscenes, just make for a game you want to throw out of the window. It's that bad. There is a decent amount of content, but who cares, as pretty much all the content, with a few very rare exceptions, is lame, and I can't think of anyone who would want to play this game till the end.
Ugh, actually, you only have to remember this sentence if you ever meet this game: Stay away from it!
THE GOOD
• learning new moves by progressing in the game adds something, I guess
THE BAD
• the gameplay mixes boring levels and frustrating challenge into one experience
• the D-Pad isn't precised enough for the 3D levels
• the visuals are pretty muddy
• the presentation and story are pretty awful
• little variety between the levels
Review Score: 3/10