Ugly Americans: Apocalypsegeddon Review

[xy_game]How well will a game adaptation of a TV show work? We’re about to find out with Comedy Central’s Ugly Americans: Apocalypsegeddon.

Ugly Americans: Apocalypsegeddon (UA:A) falls mainly into the shooter category with game-play focusing on the main cast of the Comedy Central show of the same name, Lt. Grimes, Mark Lilly, Callie Maggotbone, and Leonard Powers cleaning up the streets of New York when chaos breaks loose. With the selection of the four characters, the side-scrolling shooting game offers up both local and online co-operative play over Xbox LIVE. Online seems to be the optimal game-mode to play, as the character selection menus defaults to searching for other players online, but you can play locally with up to four people.

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For a 3D side-scrolling shoot ’em up, UA:A offers a variety of show-recognizable enemies ranging from the foul-mouthed bird-men, to the distraught zombie population of New York. In order to demolish these enemies, and gain enough XP to level up the four characters of the game there is a wide-variety of common household items such as baseballs, hammers, and even snow-globes to use as ammunition in your trek through the eleven levels in the game. Each have their own pros and cons depending on what player you choose (on how you’ve upgraded their stats) with the player-recommended weapons highlighted in the ammunition menus. Along with the varied projectiles you can use as ammunition, there are power-ups scattered around the levels offering various bonuses such as damage, speed, and health bonuses.

While the game only has a total of eleven levels, if you plan on collecting all the weapons and maxing out the levels for the characters (especially in online play) you’re set to spend a good 6-8 hours doing so, if you have the patience to re-play the same levels again and again. In overall game-play UA:A is decent, with a good (albeit relatively short) campaign mode riddled with unique weapons, dialogue and enemies making for an experience that is fun while it lasts.

Onto arguably the best, and worst part of the game: the graphics. As soon as you start up this title, you’ll notice the opening animation which stays true to the style of the show, except that every cut-scene in the game including the opening isn’t smoothly animated, but instead plays in an incredibly choppy few frames unlike anything seen on the TV show (I’m actually a pretty big fan of the show myself). Really, I can understand the folks at 345 / Comedy Central Games making deadlines for the game, but deciding to throw out the entire animation style of the show out for very choppy and painful to look at scenes only lowers the quality of the title, especially with it being the first thing everyone who loads the game will see. Besides the poor choices made for the cut-scenes, all the artwork and in-game animation shown looks, and works well following the visual style of the TV show.

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Much like the game-play, and graphics of the game; the soundtrack, and dialogue are nothing out of the ordinary, with the same voice actors being used for cut-scenes and the occasional off-color comment when using special abilities. Sadly, the Ugly Americans show was never known for their soundtrack, while the tracks for the game mix in well I never noticed any tracks besides the few boss tracks standing out. Besides a few interesting tracks, the rest are typical background music you’ll soon forget about and probably never hear again, they are good enough but they are not incredibly interesting to listen to.

For what it’s worth, UA:A is a decent game that I could find easily re-playable with friends either locally or on Xbox LIVE providing simple pick-up-and-play shoot ’em up game-play anyone can enjoy (especially for those fans of the TV show out there who’ll pick up on a lot of things). It was rather disappointing to see the laziness of the animation, with those cringe-inducing cut-scenes throughout the opening and eleven levels. If you have a spare 800 :MSPoints: lying around and are looking for a few hours of decent fun you won’t go wrong with this title. For the rest of us out there, I’d strongly suggest waiting for a deal of the week to buy this title. For both instances you can either try out the demo, or purchase the full title at the Xbox.com Marketplace.