Based on Bryan Lee O’Malley’s sharp and amusing slacker-romance comics and released to promote the film version of the same, SCOTT PILGRIM VS THE WORLD cannily draws on the 16-bit beat-’em-ups that were popular long ago when the world was young and the Gods guarded jealously the secret of steel, and whose tropes inform a large part of the comic’s aesthetic.

Choosing from one of four playable characters, the game sticks to a simple structure of seven charming characterful levels topped off with a vicious boss-battle. The fighting system contains rather more depth than classics like STREETS OF RAGE or FINAL FIGHT, finding room for two attack buttons that can be combined with directional inputs for a number of special attacks that are unlocked through levelling-up, as well as a traditional screen-clearing special move, which in this case takes the form of Scott’s Chinese-Canadian schoolgirl ex-girlfriend Knives Chau running around the screen slapping everyone to little noticeable effect.

The visual style does a good job of capturing the look of O’Malley’s artwork while simultaneously fleshing it out with colour and more detailed envisonments

While the upgrade system provides a welcome sense of progression and empowerment as the game advances, it does somewhat leave the player underpowered and easily overwhelmed at the outset of a game which has clearly been tailored more for co-operative play. As a result, playing alone can lead to being bundled by large groups of enemies who bully you into submission; a problem mainly remedied by grinding completed levels over and over again to unlock further abilities, very one of which will prove useful in cutting a path through the huge numbers of increasingly-tough opponents to be found within each level. As is often the case with energetic 2D brawlers, the screen can become overwhelmingly crowded, especially if there are four players involved, causing the game to devolve into a confusing whirl of random kicks and punches and thrown bottles and spilt whisky and bitter tears.

Boss battles can be overwhelmingly tough without the right upgrades; be prepared to put in some time grinding through earlier levels again

Review Round-Up

GRAPHICS 4/5 Vibrant and eye-catching animated visuals capture the texture of the comic very well, despite an occasional lack of clarity during busy fights. The colour palette could have stood to be a little more varied in places, but overall the game has an energetic, charming appearance.

SOUND 3/5 Quirky retro chip-based tunes and old-school sound effects fairly accurately recreate the tones of 16-bit gaming, without being in any way as memorable as anything created by the mighty Koshiro Yuzo in those days of endless summers.

GAMEPLAY 3/5 You walk from left to right beating the hell out of everything you see. This basic formula is enlivened by an atypically deep combo-based fighting system which, while not quite NINJA GAIDEN in its versatility, still makes room for parries, reversals, grabs, sliding kicks, weapons and other staples of nominally more sophisticated fighting games, and certainly has far greater depth and flexibility than SHANK, which was released around the same time. Like SHANK, it shares the controversial lack of online multiplayer.

LONGEVITY 3/5 A fairly difficult experience for a lone player, SCOTT PILGRIM VS THE WORLD can still be finished in a few hours. However, the availability of alternative endings and three other playable characters, plus the inherent simplicity of the scrolling beat-’em-up genre, gives the game a certain afterlife as an enjoyable diversion whenever you’re in the mood for a quick burst of 2D violence.

OVERALL 3/5

[starreview tpl=16]

A pleasant and well-crafted fighting game in its own right, SCOTT PILGRIM VS THE WORLD suffers not from a lack of attention to detail, but from a certain sense that everything about it is rather too calculated and fussed-over, that it is at heart a corporate product attempting to exploit our fondness of older, more innocent works. Part of what is noble and beautiful and truly touching about games like STREETS OF RAGE is their unknowable peculiarities, their sense of a group of people, artists all, flailing to communicate something about the redemptive emotional power of muscular people in ridiculous trousers mincing around Disneyland beating hookers about the head and neck with lengths of lead piping and killing dwarves with flying knee-drops on a ghost train. SCOTT PILGRIM VS THE WORLD settles instead for trying to remind us of how good those days were, how blessed we were to see, through a glass darkly, into a better, stupider, punchier world. For all its mechanical assurance, it is both the most ringing endorsement and the most damning indictment of the game when I say that it simply made me really, really want to go and play STREETS OF RAGE 2 instead.

- Elliot Mears

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