Sometimes games don’t need incredible budget and huge teams to be made. As proof, Joe Danger is a game that was made by a team of only 4 people. A very ambitious group to say the least.

The trailers for this game were quite interesting. Seemed like Excitebike, but with bigger jumps and various other obstacles. I waited a bit after it came out, but caved in and shelled out the 15$.

Read on and see if it was worth it!

Developer: Hello Games
Publisher: Hello Games
Date of Release: June 8th 2010
Platforms: Playstation 3 (PSN)

Genre: Racing/platforming/obstacle course
No Rating, though, if it did, it would be E for Everyone

Presentation
Its’ very colorful, that’s always a plus. The obstacles and characters look fun. But there’s one glaring flaw with the graphics, and it’s how every level looks the same. There’s some minor variations in the backgrounds, sometimes, but it’s not much. It’s all desert lands and it gets boring to look at relatively fast. But still, ignoring that fact, it’s a very nice looking game, with cartoonish looks and animations.

Sound-wise, there’s not much to it. You get sounds of boosts, engines, crashes and a voice announcing Joe Danger at the start of every race. The sound design is very simple, but that’s because the premise is very simple. Not to say it sounds bad, it’s just very simplistic in that sense.

Gameplay
While the trailers made it look like it played like Excitebike, it is quite different. The basics of Excitebike are there: moving forwards/backwards, doing wheelies, endos (wheelie with the front wheel), boosting and doing jumps. But that’s just about where the similarities end. You can’t even change lanes on the track like you do in Excitebike.

Here, the goal is to get points. You get points be doing wheelies, endos, flips in the air, and various tricks with the R1 and L1 buttons while in the air. For each trick you do, you get points but you also add to a multiplier. If you do another trick fast enough, you can keep adding to that multiplier. If you wait too long to do another trick, the combo ends and the multiplier resets. As you do tricks, your boost meter fills up. Boosting can be used to change directions in mid-air, or just go faster. If you crash, you lose not only your combo but also your points if you were in a combo, and you return to the last checkpoint in the course. And any time you took between that checkpoint and the point you crashed is lost as well.

Some tracks have other objectives. Some are actual races, other require you to take jumps and fall on targets, some require to pick up coins before they disappear and some have a big mix of objectives. In some you’re given a medal depending on the number of points you get, and others depending on the number of targets you hit, or the number of coins you get. The primary objective is shown when you choose the course, but each course can have various objectives. Some can ask to maintain a combo through the whole course, or maintaining a combo while doing the main objective, some may ask to pick up all the ministars, some might ask to go out of your way to find hidden stars, some ask to finish the course as fast as possible… even if you finish the game, there’s lots of objectives to complete that definitely will challenge you. Each objective done gives you a gold star, which are used to unlock tracks later on.

As for the tracks, they have jumps, bumpers kinda like Sonic, loops, buildings, bars that you have to duck under, spikes and bumps that you have to jump over, and a bunch of other things like fans that keep you in the air, moving obstacles to avoid, and traps that don’t move.  There’s a large variety of traps and trap combinations. In addition to that, there’s switch gates, which enable you to change which lane you drive it. Rather than changing lane anytime you want like in Excitebike, here, you can only change in those gates. That leads to different routes you can take through the same track, some leading to different objectives but preventing you from doing others. So to do all the sub-objectives for gold stars, you have to go through the tracks multiple times.

Overall
Joe Danger is definitely a fun little game. While it seems like a racing game at first glance, it’s actually set up a lot more like a platformer, and also quite similar to Trials HD. The graphic style is nice, the controls are pretty good, the gameplay is very well done and varied, and there’s a lot of different things to do. It’s a game that can last a good amount of time, and, most importantly, it’s fun.

I’d say it’s definitely worth checking out.

Pros and Cons
Pros
- Fun to play
- Lots of content
- Some good challenges

Cons
- Some races are really annoying
- The lack of background graphics feels rather cheap

The Save Factor
The game is $15. I’d say the soft spot for this one is $12, but I wasn’t disappointed paying the full price.

jobocan Console, Games, ps3, PSN, Review