Adventure Time: Hey Ice King! Why'd you steal our garbage?!! was an overall enjoyable experience. It took me five hours to beat, and I did it all in one sitting. The difficulty is extremely easy (that is, until the extremely difficult final boss), which makes this an easy recommendation for parents that want to gift this to their child. Unfortunately, it will feel a little boring forAdventure Time: Hey Ice King! Why'd you steal our garbage?!! was an overall enjoyable experience. It took me five hours to beat, and I did it all in one sitting. The difficulty is extremely easy (that is, until the extremely difficult final boss), which makes this an easy recommendation for parents that want to gift this to their child. Unfortunately, it will feel a little boring for experienced players. The good news is that I don't have any major complaints after playing. Looking at the big picture, it's a pretty good game. However, there were three minor complaints I had that took away from an otherwise great game.
1. The combat system: Don't get me wrong, the controls in this game were actually pretty great. I never found myself blaming the controls for any of my mistakes. However, the way that the combat in the game is structured annoyed me. Here's why:
In most games of this genre (Platformer/ARPG), you encounter various enemies roaming throughout each level. In platformers, the enemies will usually drop useful items, currency, or otherwise help you amass some sort of valuable material in the game, even if it just contributes to your overall high score. On the other hand, RPG games tend to have enemies that give you XP points upon their defeat. In other words, you level up in most RPGs by defeating monsters, otherwise known as "grinding." The problem with AT:HIKWYSOG?!! is that while it appears that it's a hybrid of the two genres, it uses neither of these mechanics. Occasionally the enemies will drop food (in my experience, very rarely) that will give you a trivial health boost. However, all of the useful items can be found in various parts of the level, and often don't even "drop" from any sort of enemy at all. Additionally, the way in which you level up has nothing to do with enemies at all. Instead, you just need to find chests to open that boost one of your stats. Therefore, the game incentivizes a reckless style of game play, in which you can just "parkour" your way through the levels, finding the fastest way to jump over each enemy, or ignore them entirely. Looking back, I could have easily beaten the game again while attacking little to no enemies at all. It simply feels like developers put enemies into the levels because they felt like they had to.
The developers attempted to fix this by adding semi-random encounters to the over world, and upon encountering one of these monsters, you are thrust into a subworld in which you fight enemies for a random item. While this does have more purpose than the standard enemies, I found this more of an unnecessary nuisance more than anything, and tried to avoid them at all cost when possible.
2. At times, the game felt tedious: It could just be a problem that comes with the fact that I marathon'ed this game, but there were a few things in AT:HIKWYSOG?!! that made the game feel sluggish, and very tedious. The biggest problem was the over world. Throughout the entire game, Finn/Jake must walk through the over world to get to various regions. This mechanic is fine, and brings some ARPG elements to the game, but the problem is that they walk at a snail's pace, and (as far as I know) you can't do anything to speed up the process. This wouldn't be a big deal if it were brief moments in which you use the over world, but it felt like over half of the game was spent waiting for Finn/Jake to crawl over to where I wanted to go. The game rewards exploration, but you never feel compelled to explore unless you know where you need to go, otherwise you could lose an hour of your time! Other factors also contributed to a tedious feeling throughout the game as well. For example, the ambiguity of the game had me stuck two or three times. Considering that a running gag throughout the game was how straightforward the Ice King's riddles are, I find it ironic that one of the game's flaws was that I couldn't figure out what it wanted me to do a few times. I ended up relying on the internet, only to find that I probably could have figured it out if it weren't for the game's ambiguous naming conventions.
3. The lack of overall polish: Although the game is designed much better than Adventure Time: Explore the Dungeon Because I DON'T KNOW! for the 3DS (I'm still trying to forget about that game, but that's a whole other can of worms), it feels lackluster at times. Whether it's the low quality audio, the occasional visual bug (often times a sort of flicker effect), or the repetitive (although catchy) sound track, the game lacked the polish of other 3DS titles. It's a shame, because at first glance the game looks very nice, and I have to admit that the pixel art is very well done. Even though I feel like this shouldn't be an issue, it kept coming back into my head as I was playing, and it takes away from the immersive qualities of a game.
With those complaints aside, I still feel that this game has its redeeming qualities, but just know that it's only mediocre.… Expand
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