Downloadable Game Reviews: Mr. Smoozles Goes Nutzo

Downloadable Game Review: Mr. Smoozles Goes Nutzo
Rating: 3 out of 5 stars

Mr. Smoozles Goes Nutzo is a newly released downloadable game from Juniper Games. The premise behind the game is the tried-and-true story of an alien invasion. Goragons, three-eyed purple slugs from another dimension, have invaded Earth and are threatening the very fabric of reality. Not only have they zapped Mr. Smoozles, the neighborhood brown cat, with their reality-altering ray guns, but they have also captured every other animal in the neighborhood.

You play the game as Ed, a blue cat who somehow managed to evade the Goragons. As Ed, your mission is simple: save your friends, save Mr. Smoozles, and then save the planet from ultimate destruction. Throughout your mission, you will encounter 50 characters in 60 different locations that will guide you on your way to Earth's salvation. You may download a a free, one-hour trial of the game from www.harryballs.com. However, after the trial exprires, you must pay $19.99 to continue playing it.

Game play on Mr. Smoozles is rather slow. After you click on the "Play Game" link, you are not taken directly to the game. Rather, you are taken to the game's credit page, which takes a full five minutes to load. Unlike other games, Mr. Smoozles does not allow you to hit the "Enter" button to bypass the credits. If you attempt to do so at this point, the game presents you with a black screen and the sinking feeling that your computer has just frozen up. After a few minutes of black-screen inactivity, the game finally loads, but you still can't play it. Instead, you must read several pages of a comic strip storyboard that tells the game's backstory. Finally, after you have familiarized yourself with the game's designer and soundtrack composer, the Goragons, and Ed's new mission, you get to play the game.

At this point, you'll realize that the graphics are as simple as that in the comic book storyboard. Mr. Smoozles is more reminiscent of an old-school Atari game or early 90's Nintendo than it is of today's 3D, graphic-intensive games. Even the game environment is old school. From the second level onward, Ed runs around in a pseudo-Pac-Man world, navigating mazes while he outruns his enemies and picks up objects that will aid him in his mission.

Mr. Smoozles, however, is far more frustrating than the arcade favorite. There is no big pellet in Ed's world that allows him to destroy Mr. Smoozles. As such, Ed must simply run from the gun-toting cat, a run that's not much faster than a lazy jog. Also Ed cannot automatically eat his "pellets." That is, he cannot just pick up the pink vortex fragments and blue reality shards that litter the maze and advance to the next level. Instead, he must jump through several, Spy Fox type of hoops to activate this ability.

Like Spy Fox, Ed must go into different rooms, talk to a variety of characters, and then piece together the clues in the characters' statements to unlock doors, activate special abilities, and locate hidden objects in the game. There is a lot of reading involved in the game. The characters' words are not audible; rather, they pop up in air quotes while the game's rather annoying parlor music continues to play in the background. If you're not careful, you could easily flip too quickly through the air quotes, miss an important clue, and spend the next hour having Ed run around in circles. While some clues can be reread if you push "Enter" or "Control," others cannot. Thus, you may have to restart the game if you cannot figure out how to unlock the ability, door, or object on your own. GA_googleFillSlotWithSize(HELAD_publishercode, "ArticleATFMiddleArticle300x250", 300, 250);

All in all, Mr. Smoozles Goes Nutzo is not a bad game. However, innovation-wise, it has been done before and done better. While this reviewer would not purchase the full version for the stated price of $19.99, she would pick it up at her local dollar store at a lower price should they ever carry it.