➤ Adventure Time: Hey Ice King! Why'd You Steal Our Garbage?!!, review 🎮

For those unfamiliar with it, Adventure Time is an animated series broadcast on the Stars and Stripes Cartoon Network since 2010, and landed a little less than a year later also on the Spanish equivalent.

It tells the adventures of Finn the adventurer, a twelve-year-old boy with great vitality and a strong moral sense, and of Jake the dog, his best friend, who has the ability to change his body by transforming, shrinking and enlarging himself. occurrence. Together, the two live in each episode of the heroic "swashbuckling" adventures in the land of Ooo, a world that as far as it is possible to guess from some clues scattered here and there should be the Earth a thousand years after a nuclear holocaust, populated by unlikely characters such as Princess Gommarosa and the Ice King, the villain of the situation. The series has achieved a little in all countries where it is broadcast a great success not only among the pre-adolescent audience to which it would tend to be aimed, but also among lower and higher age groups, due to its original graphic style, of the humor sometimes hilarious, sometimes subtle, and, we add to get to the subject we care about, for the clearly identifiable inspiration in paper role-playing games and video games. The switch to consoles was therefore absolutely natural: Hey Ice King! Why'd You Steal Our Garbage? !!, released in the US at the end of 2012 on both Nintendo DS and Nintendo 3DS, is actually the first of two games dedicated to the series, although it arrives in Europe after Adventure Time: Explore the dungeons because ... WHAT DO I KNOW !, which was instead designed for home consoles, and which did not receive a great appreciation from critics.

The Cartoon Network animated series at the new videogame test: is it time for adventure?

Hey Ganondorf!

It is enough to watch a single episode of the series to realize that the author, Pendleton Ward, grew up on bread and video games in the 80s / 90s, as he himself has stated several times.

It is therefore no coincidence that the most direct playful reference of Hey Ice King! Why'd You Steal Our Garbage? !! is the most representative videogame of the fantasy genre, The Legend of Zelda, and in particular the second episode on NES, The Adventure of Link. Just like in Miyamoto's controversial birth, WayForward's title features two different gameplay, exploratory with a top view while moving around the land of Ooo which then becomes a classic side-scrolling action / platformer every time you enter a dungeon, a city, or in any case a point of interest on the map of game. And, again as in Zelda II, the game world or at least a part of it can be freely explored from the beginning, only to be faced with obstacles or closed doors that must necessarily be overcome by acquiring a new skill or a new object. Even if the various "levels" can theoretically be tackled in any sequence, however, in reality there are some preparatory events for others, and only by identifying the right sequence can one actually proceed; in the perfect spirit of the adventures of a few years ago this "fake non-linear" structure can only be understood after having collected some information from the non-player characters, often in the form of stories and puzzles steeped in humor, while there are no tutorials or assistants to the Navi to guide you. The return to a formula of the past and frankly much more stimulating (although it is not that we ever reach extreme peaks of complexity) of today's highly guided counterparts can only please us, but good news also comes from the front of the action phases. Finn, with Jake in his backpack at the Banjo-Kazooie, moves agile for levels that are never too long (which mitigates the fact of having to repeat them several times due to the always present backtracking) and which will not be masterpieces of level design but which do not even present particular shortcomings.

The many funny and strange enemies present can be faced by Finn with his bare hands or, from a certain point on, with his sword, as well as thanks to a skill of Jake useful for greater distances and, finally, with the help of various objects. Here, however, the painful notes begin: the inventory is in fact entrusted to BMO, the video game console with which the two delight in their free time (very similar to an old Game Boy to reaffirm the bond of the Adventure Time universe with the world videogame) which, managed on the lower screen, also allows you to view the map, options and statistics (suitably improved at certain points of the journey as in an RPG). Well, the objects that can be obtained are numerous and abundant, ranging from classic foods that restore energy, to condiments that, applied to them, give greater restorative strength (or less, since the jam on the hamburger until proven otherwise is never liked by no one) up to power-ups that grant abilities above the norm for a limited period of time. All this, however, must be managed with the stylus, with the very large inventory divided into very small boxes: you drag one object over the other to combine them, click twice to use it and so on. A rather cumbersome mechanism that inevitably breaks the fast and fresh rhythm of the action; it does not compensate for the other possible control, with the dorsal keys, which perhaps does not force you to take the nib every two by three but is equally not agile.

The 3D effect

As this is a game (you will forgive us if we don't write the very long title for the umpteenth time) originally also intended for the Nintendo 3DS predecessor, the stereoscopic effect is the classic "afterthought" put there just because the console allows it. Basically it is the even more incisive rendering of the mythical levels of parallax that the owners of 16-bit consoles were so pleased to show off: no influence on the gameplay (and how could it have?), But basically it is a nice thing done well, so why deprive yourself of it?

Not an Ooo for old men

We were talking about the characteristics of the cartoon: adventure, fairy tale, humor, graphic style. All this is perfectly captured in the game, written with the collaboration of the author. Just think that the premise of the whole, also recognizable in the long title, is the Ice King who one beautiful morning shows up in Finn and Jake's house and takes away the garbage. It might seem a kindness, and as such the enemy cold makes it pass, unfortunately, however, for the subsequent collections the containers are indispensable to ours, who thus launch themselves in pursuit of the King. From then on it will be all about meeting unlikely characters, human and otherwise, some taken from the series and others created ad hoc, and solving a whole series of problems ranging from insane to pure nonsense, resulting in a lot of laughter. Even the graphics, totally in 2D, incorporate all the assets of the television series: the style may not please everyone, but the quality is undoubted from this point of view, with a good profusion of colors and varied and rich settings, a certain cleanliness and above all very numerous, fluid and fun animations. Perhaps even better is the soundtrack, from the intro entirely sung (which will not fail to print in the brain) to quality music and as a composition and as a technique, although not too much is wasted on speech.

So why only the sufficiency? What Hey Ice King! Why'd You Steal Our Garbage? !! is a game that, among all the age groups to which the cartoon is dedicated, chooses the lowest, it is a fact: the title certainly would also like to have a grip on those who have played adventure games of the past decades, but its not high complexity, the difficulty curve calibrated well but which only goes from easy to "a little less easy" and the duration that does not exceed five to six hours are all characteristics aimed at capturing an audience, let's say from elementary school or a little more. A sort of "my first adventure", in short, and it's not that this is bad in itself, quite the contrary. But two collateral facts to this choice must necessarily be pointed out and cannot be treated with indulgence. The first is actually not about the game itself but about the hold it may have here: Hey Ice King! Why'd You Steal Our Garbage? !! it has in fact remained totally in English. And it is not a clean, linear, scholastic English, which some university students already have problems understanding, let alone children. On the contrary, he is a very young English, rich in slang, neologisms, grammatical errors, also in respect of the cartoon, and it is moreover necessary to move forward correctly since, as we said, to understand the exact path to be taken between explorability free and backtracking is only possible by reading, and sometimes interpreting, the words of the characters. The other (very) weak point is, merely, the price. Such a short duration can sometimes be a right choice, a low or no push to replay value is a defect of all representatives of the genre, but Adventure Time, released by us only on eShop (in America there is also the boxed version ), costs the beauty of 40 euros. There are on 3DS, whether digital or retail, dozens and dozens of titles much richer in content and that require only a small fraction of the cost of the new WayForward: why, we ask ourselves, to bring a game, however very short, to us with so big delay, choose the way of the eShop to limit costs and risks and then propose it at the price of the largest productions for the console?

Comment

Version tested: Nintendo 3DS Digital Delivery: Nintendo eShop Price: € 39,99 Resources4Gaming.com

6.0

Readers (3)

3.1

Your vote

Adventure Time: Hey Ice King! Why'd You Steal Our Garbage? !! it is certainly not a masterpiece and probably does not even want to be. However, the structure so alluring to the great classics of the past, the fast, agile and all in all well designed game action, the respect for the characteristics of the animated series from which it is based and the good technical realization would make it an excellent adventure for beginners and almost an essential gadget for cartoon fans ... If only for the lack of translation into Spanish, which would have been very welcome given the mechanics and the type of English used, and above all for the price too, too high compared to the size game offer. Let's do it this way: if you really can't live without anything that bears the Adventure Time trademark, think about it, explore the dungeons because ... WHAT DO I KNOW! it doesn't seem like an alternative to the height, otherwise give it the chance it deserves when, and if, they decide on a nice price cut.