Everyone’s played Frogger, right? The only frog in the world who can’t swim and seems to enjoy getting across the road? Well, he’s back with a purpose, but is he worth you shelling out those valuable MS points on?
Frogger 2 starts with the story of an alien named Pico. He’s crashed his spaceship, scattering vital parts of it all over Firefly swamp, home to Frogger. Being the nice helpful frog he is, our hero decides to help Pico by collecting the parts to get his spaceship in full working order again. It’s a simple enough story, I suppose. Our frog has a goal other than just getting across the road.
You’d be forgiven for thinking this game is intended for younger gamers at first glance, but believe me, it isn’t. It looks all cutesy and cartoon like with bright colours, a look not unlike one you’d expect from an internet flash game, but you’d need the patience of a saint to play it without throwing the control pad to the floor at least once an hour. The amount of times I hopped stupidly into the water or missed a lily pad was uncountable.
A big change is that you can no longer see the entire level on your screen in one go. You have a start point and have to bounce your way to the end of the level avoiding enemies and traversing obstacles along the way. While the change is quite nice and adds variety, this in itself can be hugely frustrating due to the inability to scroll around the level and plot your path to the goal. You find yourself blindly jumping onto moving platforms of some kind or another in the vain hope of a safe landing when you get to solid ground again, then assessing the situation if (and only if) you make it.
There are collectables too, in the shape of coins and musical notes, so if you’re anything like me, ever so slightly on the obsessive side and you want to collect everything you can, you’ll find yourself backtracking when you realised you took the path to the left and the music note is over on the right. Mildly annoying, but I do like collecting stuff in games!
Thankfully, there are checkpoints along the route to the goal, so if you die (and you will die a lot!) you restart the level from here, should you have reached one in the first place. It’s frustrating enough at times, if these checkpoints weren’t there it wouldn’t take long for your average gamer to lose interest.
The controls are simple enough. Hit the A button to shoot out Frogger’s tongue, enabling him to grab coins and musical notes which would otherwise be unreachable. The bumper buttons rotate him on the spot at 90 degree increments, and the analogue stick or the D Pad makes the little guy hop in the direction you push. I found myself occasionally jumping forward a couple of places by accident, which added to the frustrating parts of the game. Especially when jumping forward two places into a fiery pit of lava. That’s always annoying.
Aside from the regular single player Story mode, there is also Time Attack, which sees the player trying to get the frog with swimming issues to the goal as quickly as possible. This mode has the addition of Advanced mode, where you need to collect all the musical notes as quickly as you can. I’m not sure these modes really add anything exciting to the game, unless you like to win bragging rights if you’re super fast and your friends are not.
Multiplayer offers up Jewel Duel, a mode where players fight for possession of the onscreen jewel. This is points based and the first player with 100 points is the winner. The other multiplayer mode is Race. Fairly obvious stuff, the first player to get their frog to the goal wins. Unfortunately, there was no one around to play with, so I sat on my own in a lobby, waiting for players to join, slowly being driven crazy by the repetitive loop of cutesy music until I lost patience and left. However, that said, I liked the look of the multiplayer and think that from the modes on offer it would be fun with friends.
Overall, Frogger 2 isn’t a bad game, but it can be a frustrating challenge. I quite enjoyed playing it up to the point where I started to lose my patience with the amount of times I killed my froggy buddy. There came a point where nothing made me want to bother to complete the level and I turned it off. If you are not easily annoyed at dying in a game, then maybe this is for you. If you’re a scream at the TV, throw the controller, stamp on your Xbox kind of person, it’s probably best to avoid this offering.
