Review of Fantastic Four: Flame On (GBA)

Fantastic Four: Flame On is a largely unheard of video game for the Game Boy Advance. It's a solidly fun affair and worth checking out, especially if you're a Fantastic Four fan.

Story : The shape shifting alien race known as the Skrulls have captured your girlfriend. You are Johnny Storm, also known as The Human Torch. It's up to you to rescue your girlfriend and the save the world. Are you up to the job?

The story is by no means amazing, but platform beat em up games rarely have coherent stories as it is. In this game the only playable character is Johnny Storm. Only three villains from the Fantastic Four mythos make it into this game. Paibok, The Power Skrull. Terrax, Herald of Galactus. Galactus, Devourer of Worlds. Unfortunate considering the amount of choices available.

Graphics : Graphics are excellent. Human Torch looks great and has many frames of animation. All the enemies are drawn well, showing a wealth of animations themselves. The backgrounds are bright and vibrant and are very large.

Sound : The sound effects are all good and none are distracting. The music is quite mundane but is overall a mediocre effort. A lot of the tracks feature a minimal amount of harmony and there's nothing to really capture your ear at all.

Game play : Human Torch is an absolute blast to play as. He's extremely versatile and has several moves. He can punch, jump, double jump, air dash, fireball, inferno, and supernova.

All his moves are extremely fluid and responsive. The super moves look great and are quite thrilling to use. The inferno shoots forth a large column of fire in front of you and the supernova hits the entire screen with a fire blast. Another great thing is your ''super'' meter builds very fast, so you can use your super moves fairly often. You also start each level with four of them, ready to go.

The enemies are fun to battle and aren't too difficult but aren't pushovers either. You can get through most of the game just mashing buttons and watching the carnage from your fire attacks. It's a very cathartic feeling.

There's four kinds of levels in the game. Standard fighting, flying, bike, and snowboarding. The bike and snowboarding levels only show up once each. The snowboarding level is mediocre at best, but it's very short and serves as a semi decent detour. The motorcycle level is a blast once you get the hang of it, too bad it only pops up once.

The flying levels aren't unlike the shoot em' ups of yesteryear. Very fun but can be difficult sometimes, as you can't help but get hit by many of the flying objects. The standard fighting levels are plentiful.

Now, we come to the game's very huge flaw: it's length. Many of the levels are far, far too long. The game itself also features too many levels with not much payoff. Most of the levels go on forever then simply end with no engaging boss fights. In fact, there's only three true boss fights in the game. They are entertaining but too few in number when compared to the rest of the game.

Re playability : Because of it's length, I will probably never replay this game unless I'm in the specific mood to play a Fantastic Four game. Still, the game play is excellent and if you aren't trying to ''blaze'' through the game, you can have fun with it.

Overall : 7/10. A great game bogged down by unnecessary length, not many boss fights, mediocre music and only a few villains from the comics