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Reviews (2)
Aug 14, 2022
3D Platformer Marred by Interesting Development History
Vexx is a sixth generation platformer (released on PS2, Gamecube, and Xbox) heavily inspired by Super Mario 64. As a result of this, the core controls are pretty good for the most part. The titular Vexx long jumps, high jumps, and flare kicks with ease, arguably better than SM64 Mario does. However around the movement controls, there are several issues that add up against it.
Originally the game aimed to be almost entirely open world with stronger combat focus. However due to insufficient resources and time crunch at Acclaim Austin, the once whole game world of 18 levels was shattered into just 9 separated levels. As a result this caused a lot of content to be cut and shuffled around the game. From a story aspect, this makes the story confusing since there is dialogue that references the old world layout instead of the final layout, granted there's barely any dialogue in the game to begin with. For the gameplay aspects, this made many parts of the game to be left unpolished, confusing, out of place, and often times more difficult than they should be. Some harder sections from the later portion of the original plan show up earlier in the final product and can cause difficulty spikes that force you to learn quick or come back later. However it is worth noting that even with the cuts, many of the collectibles still have multiple ways to approach them, even if some ways seem unintentional by design. This gives the player some creativity in tackling platforming challenges.
The worst aspect overall is probably the notorious camera, which can be controlled by the player in some areas and not in others. To the new casual player, this can result in many deaths from being unable to gauge jumps or see what's happening in front of you. Sometimes you can reorient the camera by pressing triangle/Y to bring the camera behind you in an over-the-shoulder view (like in PS1 Spyro games), but sometimes it doesn't amount to much. This is the only way to center the camera behind Vexx as well, no immediate "click R3 to center camera behind you" function like with earlier platformers of this console generation.
The PS2 version is notably the worst out of the three sixth gen consoles. During my time 100%ing it, it seemed like particle effects and sound effects present in the other two versions were missing. More noticeably is that the game rarely ever hit the 60 FPS mark, unlike the other two versions (something that was originally claimed possible for all three consoles pre-release of the game). I also had to deal with very long auto-saves after retrieving major collectibles, which could be attributed to my larger 16 MB memory card. Unsure if that is the exact cause though.
Overall the final product is fairly mid-grade to me. Once again due to development issues, this came out much later than big games like Jak and Daxter, which were actively redefining the 3D platformer standards. As a result, Vexx missed the boat on newer quality of life concepts while it remained tunnel-visioned on SM64. All this being said, it's still an okay package sure to interest anyone who loves SM64 or older 3D platformers with decent movement controls. Ultimately I felt like I had a better time uncovering the game development history than playing the game itself, since so much happened that shaped not only Vexx but other parts of the game industry. I won't play the PS2 version again, but I definitely want to see this game have a redemption in this age of remakes/remasters.
Sep 19, 2024
Haven't had time to delve into the game ...
Haven't had time to delve into the game itself at time of writing, but Sengoku Basara 4 is basically more of what I want. SB3/Utage was already pretty good, this game has more of that plus returning characters and all the DLC on-disc to save me the trouble of trying to link a JP PSN to get them. Easily worth it.