Reviewed: November 5, 2005
Reviewed by: Daniel Sayre
Publisher
THQ
Developer
Avalanche Software
Released: September 19, 2005
Genre: Action
Players: 1
ESRB: Everyone
7
8
6
4
6.5
Supported Features:
As Tak’s first foray onto the DS, Tak: The Great Juju Challenge comes barreling into play with two selectable characters and a host of challenges. As the fourth game in the series, a lot has happened to Tak since “Tak and the Power of Juju” Entering the Great Juju Challenge to earn the favor of the Moon Juju, Tak and Lok with have to outrun, outrace, and out flick their rivals in order to carry the day.
Tak: The Great Juju Challenge is a platformer with racing and other elements mixed in to take advantage of the touch screen. You control two characters, Tak and Lok; each has a special ability that will force you to switch between them during the course of the game. Tak can swim in the water, as well as attack much faster. Lok can climb walls and attack less often, but with a more powerful hit. Each of them can run, jump, and glide.
Control is handled primarily with the face pad, which moves the actual character. The "L and R" buttons move the camera side to side and there is an analog control reticule on the touch screen that can be used for more precise movement of the camera (side to side and up and down.) The control scheme does a great job of just letting you control the character, RARELY does the camera go spastic or leave you looking at a weird angle. On the off chance it does, the camera controls are a breeze.
As with most platform games, items are to be hoarded, in Tak's case these fall into several categories. The rokkar crystal, once enough are collected, allow Tak and Lok to use different combos. The crystal collection isn't linked and if you want BOTH characters to have great attack repertoire’s you'll need to switch between them often.
The other collectables take the form of ingredients for big power ups that affect your character in a major way, giving him more health, attack power and so on. These can only be obtained at certain portions in the game so it doesn't become too overwhelming for the enemies arrayed against you.
Enemy repetition is very high with Tak and Lok fighting less then ten minions the entire game. The boss characters spice things up somewhat but things start to get boring once you destroy “Rock Creature 40” and “Angry Scorpion 17”.
The highlights of the game, in my mind, are the touch screen mini-games. You have around ten of them and each one offers a different type of challenge whether it’s trying to block fireballs or throwing a sheep across a ravine they never get tiresome during the course of gameplay. They also use the DS to its full potential. It’s all there, microphone and stylus usage both.
In addition to the touch screen mini games breaking the plat former dry spells, one of the “Juju Challenge” events is cart racing. These little interludes come at the end of every few stages. As with Tak and Lok, you can upgrade your cart with blessing gems. In the beginning the cart physics are floaty and imprecise but once you plop a few upgrades on it, things become a bit more manageable. It’s still won’t put Burnout to shame, but it gets the job done. It would’ve been even nicer if they had made it a bigger part of the game, maybe even added in some Mario Kart like pickups and attacks.
The difficulty is great for kids, there are no “lives” per se, if you die, you simply start near where you perished. It helped keep frustration due to deaths from falling, more on that below, away. The enemies themselves have simply patterns they always repeat so by the time a few stages are done the game almost becomes grind. The mini-games and cart racing help boost the difficulty more back into range (but still not overly hard) the bosses, save for the last one, aren’t pushovers but are from difficult. The last boss is easily the toughest part of the game but they too fall once you get the attack patterns down.
When I first saw the game in action, I immediately thought of the N64. That's about the closest approximation I can make. However, the textures look a little less sharp and you don't have that anti-aliasing wash that muddied many an N64 game. That could be a plus or minus depending on your viewpoint.
The game maintains a steady framerate throughout the levels you must traverse. Each of the mini-games and races are also stable. Unfortunately, towards the end the stages themselves become repetitive and somewhat confusing.
The bottom touch portion of the screen is used for the analog control and to switch between Tak and Lok. There is also the stand "menu screen" rundown as well, items, health, how much you've collected, that sort of thing.
The cutscenes are handled through static pictures of much higher quality graphics. That, along with the silent text, does much to knock you out of the action. The writing also is hampered by the lack of spoken word with many of the quips failing to be funny when read off the page and not recited by the characters.
Another problem is the solidness of the game world, more then once I jumped onto solid ground only to pass through it into the nether regions and lost all health. While far from a game ending bug, it did happen more then once which seems to say the game might have needed a little more attention at the polishing stage.
Each stage has ambient music, with each tune not being anything to write home about. The game dialog is handled entirely through text causing some of the jokes and humor to fall flat. The ambient noise does a much better job then the music, especially on the touch screen enabled stages. The music and so on isn't necessarily bad, it just isn't very good.
The game itself can be completed in one sitting; such a situation does bode well for something being a good value for the money. Perhaps to offset this, the game comes standard with a slightly "dumbed-down" Zookeeper-esque mini-games using Tak characters.
The difference being here you can move pieces even if they don't immediately lead to a three-piece match. Completing this will unlock the other extras which themselves aren‘t all that stellar. You are allowed to replay the touch screen mini-games once you beat them in the single player story. This is a great addition and does add somewhat to the longevity of the game, as these little mini-games were easily the best part of the entire package.
Enjoyable would be a good word to sum up my experience with Tak: The Great Juju Challenge. The tactile mini-games were inspired, but the actual platforming elements were simply average. The graphics were decent, the extras largely boring and the difficulty a little easy. As the sum of its parts, the game was just a notch above average.
I'd heartily recommend a rental if you're a fan of platforms games or a Tak-aholic, but the game simply isn't long enough for it to be worth most people picking up.
