Frogger Hyper: Arcade Edition
Reviewed By Stephen Pastic
As tempting as it is to simply do a one sentence review of this game - "it's Frogger with some additional modes and visuals", for the sake of the interested or the uniformed (i.e. young people), read on as we take aim at this recent PSN release.
Frogger is an OLD game from the glory days of Atari systems (ask your parents, kids) and basically tasks the player with moving a frog across a hazard filled road and stream towards the goal at the top of the screen. No doubt many older gamers have at least a passing familiarity with the title, and in its time was regarded as a very popular title. Any semblance of story is not to be found here, as players would routinely try to one-up each other by garnering the largest possible score.
Given Frogger's age, interaction is for the most part pretty limited - moving either up, down, left or right make up most of the players tools in trying to avoid the cars on the road, the alligators at the top of the screen, and that freaking snake in the middle. However, the developer behind the game has also thrown in some pretty new visuals as well as some additional game modes to round out the package.
Visually, players have the option of choosing between various permutations of the game ranging from the classic 8-bit style, to a more modern look, and even to old school Castlevania and Dance Dance Revolution themed levels. Whilst there is definitely a novelty to these different visages, gameplay is unchanged. Players can also choose from a list of in game music, as well as switch between two control schemes (which are pretty much the same regardless).
As for the additional modes, there is Paint, where the player must avoid hazards as they try to move across the play space and colour in tiles before time runs out. Tile Capture pits you against an opponent where the goal is to cover and paint as much of the board as possible, before making it to the goal and "locking in" the tiles you have just captured in that same life (hence making those tiles unavailable for your opponent).
Twin Frog gives you control of two frogs spaced apart simultaneously and otherwise plays identically to vanilla Frogger - albeit at a much higher difficulty, as losing just one frog will cause you to lose a life. Battle Royale is an odd one, where players aim to catch the lady frog and then try to squash the other frogs whom you had beaten in getting to her. This mode also features a simple powerup system whereby players can utilise randomly spawing pick ups to either freeze opponents, teleport opponents, or reverse their control schemes.
Frogger Hyper is definitely a faithful update of the classic title with a decent chunk of new content, but unfortunately the package as a whole feels really insubstantial. Nothing is really broken at all, but save for hardcore Frogger fans it is really hard to envision many people spending a significant amount of time with the game beyond trying out each of the game modes. Furthermore, after checking the title's price point of $15 on PSN, it becomes really tough to recommend this update over similarly priced games available.
No doubt there will be many people who grew up with the game and still like the thought of ending up in a genital swinging contest with their friends on the leaderboards, but for anyone else I doubt it will be received with that kind of enthusiasm, especially given it's current asking price. However, as stated before nothing is really broken and control wise, everything works as it should.
The little graphical facelifts and added game modes also help to give the game a fresh appeal to those who fondly remember getting squashed by that bastard truck - who incidentally, is clearly speeding.
Rating: 60%
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Game: Frogger Hyper: Arcade Edition
System: PS3
Developer/Co-Developer: Zombie Studios
Publisher: Konami
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