Frogger Returns (PS3)
As odd as it may sound, the Frogger series really does seem like it’s trying to gaslight consumers. Besides one long break from 1984 to 1997, the Frogger series has been putting out new titles almost yearly, and yet they have made three titles all trying to reel in customers with the boast they are Frogger 2 while others instead go for the angle of declaring that Frogger is making its grand return. Frogger Returns was released in 2009 in North America, and despite it’s whole gimmick being the return of this classic arcade game character, one of the games called Frogger 2 had released the previous year and there had been multiple Frogger games released every year since 2000 save for skipping 2004. Whether or not these are successes is another story, but Frogger Returns really does feel like it’s hoping you hadn’t been paying attention to the series so this can at least feel like a comeback of sorts for a frog that really hadn’t gone away at all.
Frogger Returns does stick close to the gameplay style of the original arcade Frogger, although this isn’t unique in the series either to brush away the theory that this is the return of that specific gameplay type. In the game’s Arcade mode, your goal is to hop your way across a busy level without falling into the water, getting smashed into by an object, or getting caught by a predator. Five open spots sit at the end of a level, and if you can get Frogger across the stage to each of these without losing all your lives, you will have completed the level and can move onto the next one. Arcade mode will continue until you’re out of lives, but with four stages with unique hazards to cycle through it won’t be too repetitive if you do manage to get on a tear.
While Frogger can normally only jump a single space forward, back, or to the sides, there are power-ups in play to help the little frog have a better chance of making across multiple lanes of hazards and moving platforms. One can freeze all enemies so that they won’t chase after you, another will instead reverse their movement which doesn’t truly have a huge impact since they’re still dangerous while moving backwards, and another can give you limited invincibility where you can hop forward like mad regardless of what dangers are in your path or if you’d even be standing on solid ground. A typical round of Frogger isn’t too easy or hard, the player needing to notice the patterns in the movements of the enemies to slip by them and watch how vital platforms line up so they can hop across them safely before they move off screen and kill Frogger if he’s riding them. When you first enter a level the layout is mildly randomized so you can’t just memorize the required movements to win, the exact speed of enemies and platforms changing as well as how they are grouped together.
There are four unique levels in Frogger Returns, all of them adhering to the idea that you need to hop upwards to reach the alcoves that are your goal. Big City is a mild callback to the original Frogger arcade game, the player first needing to cross a road with cars driving by before they slip past some dogs, hop across some turtles and logs, and then cross another road before conveyor belts make getting into the goal a bit inconvenient. A fine enough introduction to the game, and one that includes a bit of a power-up freebie with some green switches early in the stage you can press to freeze the nearby dangers. Since the two dogs are the only thing in the game that seems to break away from the rule of only traveling in a set lane, having them frozen so they don’t chase after you makes this early stage a bit easier and a fine introduction to the game’s style.
The Subway level makes things a bit more difficult with train tracks you need to cross despite the fast moving trains. Rats like to move around the edges of where you wait to safely hop across the roofs of trains, and you need to get those subway trains moving by hitting an easily accessible button. The sewers focus a lot more on the speed of the moving objects, with the barrels floating in sewer sludge interspersed between lanes with patrolling rats that can be challenging to safely cross if you don’t get your timing right. The steam hazard though is incredibly easy to deal with since it uses the same pattern every time you play, but the sinking boxes after are more about waiting patiently than really thinking about what you’re doing. The final level, the Swamp, can feel like it’s a bit more about patience at times too, the game not putting anything patrolling the edges of the water so you can charge forward through the gaps between snakes and diving eagles to wait for when the logs or alligator backs line up how you like them. There is an annoying monkey who throws boomerang bananas to make hopping on the middle set of logs a bit more difficult, but like most levels it settles into being a decent level for the action if not one that feels like it’s asking too much out of you.
Besides the Arcade mode’s survival focus, you can also play every level on their own in Time Trial and Score Attack or try to do a full run of four levels within the rules of those modes. Time Trial removes the death penalty for failing to complete a level in time and instead gives you infinite lives to try and beat the stage in as little time as possible, while Score Attack instead keeps the lives system and time limits but makes the goal about racking up as many points as possible while playing even though the main way of scoring is just moving forward. You can grab a pink frog you see floating by on logs or riding subway cars for some extra points if you help her reach the level’s end, but the score challenge isn’t particularly deep. Lastly, there is a Free Play mode if you want to remove all external pressures, but there is no option to pick the level you want to play in that mode so its value seems to be more in helping it be more accessible to kids rather than a means of training on level designs.
Frogger Returns continues to try and get more out of its four simple levels with its four multiplayer modes. Classic Race is the simplest with the idea being that whoever can grab three of a level’s five end goals will be declared the victor while Territories changes it so whoever has the most goals grabbed by the end of the round wins, the added wrinkle of being able to steal goals from each other in this mode making that more competitive. Collector and Fly Feast both focus on picking up flies that are scattered around the level, but while Fly Feast only cares about quantity, Collector will only provide points for them if you safely drop them off at a goal. Delivering a bigger batch of flies leads to a bigger point pay out, so coupled with Territories they make a more strategic half of multiplayer games to balance out the more straightforward pair of Fly Feast and Classic Race. The shifts to the formula aren’t so strong they really hold your interest any better than regular play in Frogger Returns, but they’re a fine enough multiplayer component to at least give a look.
Had this been all there was to say about Frogger Returns, the game would have turned out to be rather mediocre but pretty harmless. It has a few good ideas of how to make play challenging like when you need to time crossing lanes or enemies are placed so you aren’t able to just linger in select spots until things look the way you’d like them to be. However it’s not much more than iterating on the original arcade game’s design and if this was a true return of the Frogger formula, that would be fine enough. However, there is one big issue lingering in this simple downloadable title that undermines those efforts, and that’s a big problem with visual clarity.
Things don’t get off the best start graphically when a lumpy frog greets you on the title screen looking worse then he did in a PS1 game from the year 2000, but even a Frogger who looks like he was molded out of Play-Doh isn’t necessarily a problem since graphical fidelity isn’t too important as long as it doesn’t impede the way the game plays. Unfortunately, it does just that, primarily because of the difference between the way movement mechanics and map designs line up. Frogger can only move forward in single hops that cover what you might consider a square of terrain. Unfortunately you need to press the direction you wish to hop every time you want to hop rather than holding that direction to keep moving, and that small delay in movement can be an issue when timing your leap onto something moving or trying to slip between groups of enemies safely. Even if you account for the delay in your movements, your grid-based movement doesn’t quite gel with the visual design of the four levels you travel through.
Perhaps the worst problem the visual discrepancy causes is knowing when it’s safe to still be on a moving object. Whether it’s a conveyor belt, log, subway car, barrel, or other object that appears from one side of the screen and travels to the other, the line where Frogger will instantly die if he’s still on that object isn’t clear. There is a line sometime to use as reference, but just as often Frogger will suddenly croak if you wait a little too long to hop off near the borders of the screen and often a bit before you could clearly realize your frog was in jeopardy. When you hop into the road you might be visually safe from the car that drove by just now, but if you’re a little too close you’ll learn that vehicle is secretly box shaped and able to kill you just because you were too close to its invisible damage barrier. Gators have spikes on their back that can kill you even if it looked like you looked like you were going to land on the safe part of their back, and leaping into the alcoves at the end of the level can also kill you if you’re a little bit off and your frog isn’t leaping perfectly into that snug spot.
The visuals don’t indicate they’re adhering to the grid rigidly so cheap or unexpected deaths can crop up often, but there’s also just the fact that many areas have a spot that doesn’t even look safe to stand. Since you move forward in a small jump, sometimes it can seem like you’re beside the river or subway tracks when you’re actually still one space back. This is because these edges don’t often fill a full square visually to try and look a bit more natural, but with your movement limited the way it is you will quite obviously hesitate to take a jump that looks so unsafe. While trying to jump forward and learning it is actually safe isn’t a big problem, it does easily encapsulate how poorly Frogger Returns conveys vital information for movement to the player, the game prioritizing the look of objects and the environment rather than how you actually interact with it.
THE VERDICT: Frogger Returns almost turned out to be a decent execution of the classic Frogger formula, it’s four levels having a few differences between them to challenge you on your ability to leap at the right time and avoid the dangers lurking in the lanes between you and your goal. Different modes, an alright multiplayer component, and some helpful power-ups build off that well too, but the game’s graphics routinely get in the way of properly judging how your actions will play out. With movement being the entire focus of the game, the idea that you can seem safe only to touch an unclear death barrier or brush against an enemy’s invisible collision detection makes it hard to prefer this version of Frogger over any that manage to get the relationship between visuals and the grid-based movement right.
And so, I give Frogger Returns for PlayStation 3…
A BAD rating. It’s strange to say that Frogger Returns prioritizes the look of its locations, objects, and enemies over clearly conveying how they actually impact Frogger when you see how doughy the opening screen’s version of the frog is, but that does indeed seem to be the case. From the little annoyances with small strips of land not being clearly safe to stand on until you dare to hop to the edge to how far an enemy or hazard’s reach extends beyond their 3D model, it proves annoying to play Frogger Returns by its rules. Getting a high score run ruined or failing to make it through a Full Run due to the lack of visual clarity stings, and if this was truly Frogger attempting to return to prominence, you’d expect them to iron out such simple issues to make that go smoothly. There’s not much wrong with the level designs inherently, the parades of rats good at defending lanes you might linger in otherwise and trains of snakes forcing you to identify your opening and move quickly. The monkeys’ boomerang bananas have the damage detection problem with being smaller in appearance than they are in functionality, but something like the gator’s back spikes wouldn’t be an issue if the grid-like design of Frogger Returns was conveyed more clearly in the visuals. If there were two square shaped spots on the gator’s back then you’d know to aim for those with your single square hops, but a lot of the visuals try to be a bit too natural in how objects round out or otherwise avoid adhering to grid patterns and it just makes all the varied modes lesser for it.
None of the modes or maps in Frogger Returns are so innovative that they couldn’t be brought back in some new attempt to convince people Frogger is making a comeback, but tidying up the visuals both in appeal and in indicating how actions will play out would definitely be a must to ensure this game’s content can actually deliver on its mild potential. Frogger Returns, funnily enough, can’t be said to be rough around the edges because its smoothing of those edges often leads to the player misjudging when it’s safe to try and cross a river or dodge a car. Whenever Frogger makes his next supposed return he can always carry over the basics of what worked here for something more polished, but it’s more likely Konami will want us to completely forget this shoddy little comeback too.