Regular Show: Mordecai and Rigby In 8-Bit Land

Platform game specialist WayForward is capable of great things - see Mighty Switch Force and Shantae. But it's also capable of terrible things - Double Dragon Neon and DuckTales: Remastered.

After playing new release Regular Show: Mordecai and Rigby In 8-Bit Land, I think I may have stumbled across a pattern. It seems that WayForward struggles to make good games with other people's IP.

Show and tell

Mordecai and Rigby from Cartoon Network's Regular Show have been sucked into a video game, and are now being subjected to a sub-par homage to old school Super Mario.

There are a couple of interesting ideas buried away in this 3DS platformer. Switching between characters to fit through gaps and reach high places could have led to some interesting puzzles, but in practice the contexts in which you need to use this ability are always obvious.

Switching to other character forms - such as a spaceship on the space levels - also opens up the potential for interesting level design, but again this potential is squandered, in this case owing to flimsy, awful controls. The characters float around and regularly overshoot where you hoped to land them, making the simpliest of tasks a chore to complete.

And some of the collision detection is laughable. At one point, an enemy just slightly above me spontaneously died as he was passing over the point where I was standing.

Cancelled

As a result of the crap controls and stupid collisions, Regular Show: Mordecai and Rigby In 8-Bit Land is unreasonably hard.

One-hit deaths mean there's no leeway to compensate for the poor design, while terrible end-of-world bosses add to the pain.

It's a shame, because there are some intriguing design elements hidden away beneath this shoddiness. The soundtrack is solid, too, fitting in wonderfully with the era of games that it's aim to give a nod to.

Yet within minutes of booting up the game for the first time I was forcing myself to keep on going. There's nothing fun to find here at all, and it was a massive pain to keep pushing through level after level.

Regular Show: Mordecai and Rigby In 8-Bit Land is WayForward at its worst. Here's hoping the studio's next game will be a good one to balance it out.

Regular Show: Mordecai and Rigby In 8-Bit Land

Whether or not you believe WayForward is an indie saviour for the Nintendo 3DS, there's no denying that Regular Show is the studio's worst release
Score
Mike Rose
Mike Rose
An expert in the indie games scene, Mike comes to Pocket Gamer as our handheld gaming correspondent. He is the author of 250 Indie Games You Must Play.