The Fancy Pants Adventures was not something that I had come across online before so I went in to this review without any ideas of what I was expecting. My first thought upon seeing it load was of the 90’s 7up character – Fido Dido.
This being a PSN game, a few preconceptions as to its game play were made. It was likely to be fast, arcade-like, multi-player and very easily pick-up and put-down. For the most part my experience with The Fancy Pants Adventure was like this.
At the start you have the option to play local or online. I started with local and was impressed to see local 4-player co-op available. Getting in to the game was quick and very few instructions required reading. What I did find though was that the point or objective of the game was very obscure. To start with Mr. Fancy Pants and I were after the thieves who had stolen the kings bathtub. Why this was the case, I’m not sure and what little round squiggles had to do with it was beyond me as well. However, I very quickly picked up that collecting these squiggles was a good idea and even completed a challenge to gain a gold one.
Now it was during this challenge that the frustrations first started to appear. Whilst death was hard to come by (unless you managed to fall off the screen as in later levels), completing jumps, challenges and landing on the right obstacles did become a mounting frustration. And the longer I was playing the more annoyed with these little frustrations I became. I’m not the greatest gamer in the world, but I’m certainly not the worst either and a title like this which appears to be aimed at kids would lose their attention very quickly. It was too easy to miss jumps, run into spiders or run off the end of platforms due to the speed at which the main character travelled. The jump button felt very unresponsive and I found myself hammering on it at times or depressing it so hard that the import was left on my thumb. The character wouldn’t quite jump on cue or as high as you thought you had pressed for and this meant that you missed jumps, didn’t bounce off the walls as planned and ran off the edge of ledges all too often.
I’m sure that with some patience this would be very playable and in multiplayer (especially co-op) would provide some fun but it just wasn’t rewarding for me to play. Originally this game was £7.99 and I would never have considered purchasing it. It was recently in a PSN sale for £5.49, which, if you had a couple of others to play it with would possibly be worth considering. However, there are so many better PSN games to play and at better price points that I couldn’t recommend this.
Disclaimer:All scores given within our reviews are based on the artist’s personal opinion; this should in no way impede your decision to purchase the game.
