The Shrekoning: Shrek 2: Beg for Mercy! (GBA)

It appears I wasn’t the only one who thought Shrek 2 on the Game Boy Advance significantly improved after the introduction of Puss in Boots, as a year later the developer Vicarious Visions would take the feline sword-fighter and give him a starring role in a game of his own. Made years before the charismatic cat would realize his headlining potential in a film from Dreamworks he was made the lead in the GBA title Shrek 2: Beg for Mercy!, although his first time in the spotlight clearly borrows a lot from the game it’s technically a sequel to. Despite reused ideas though, this could have been the perfect chance to flesh out the skills of the character who was already the most satisfying to play as in that little ensemble puzzle platformer, but while there was a clear shift towards more fighting action here, there were quite a few odd choices in how it decided to structure this follow-up.

Shrek 2: Beg for Mercy! does seem like it would be a chance to flesh out the history of Puss in Boots, but rather than having the player actually experience his fairy tale origin, it is quickly recapped in the opening cutscene and the game instead takes an odd approach of having it mostly pad out the moments seen in the film. Shrek 2: Beg for Mercy! is primarily a story about how Puss in Boots travels to meet Shrek after getting hired to kill him, deviating briefly to try and find a weapon for the task, and later after switching sides to help the friendly ogre and his pal Donkey he is mislead into believing that the two died and goes off on a small quest for revenge before things can reset to Puss being where he is in the film. It’s a rather unambitious and frankly rather uninteresting direction for the story and he spends much of the story just traveling through forests or caves, the game featuring fewer levels than the game that preceded it as well. Perhaps the team’s hands were tied on what Dreamworks would let them establish about their new character though, but the small stakes of this story and its confines lead to there only being one boss battle that is an underwhelming confrontation with the kind of characters who were deliberately unremarkable thugs in the film.

This game does mostly feel like an excuse to expand on Puss in Boots’s gameplay from Shrek 2 though, and this time the cat gets to unsheathe his sword more often for small fights. Enemies aren’t particular inventive though, one of the most common types being a skeleton whose strategy is mostly to walk towards you and you need to repel him back with some basic sword swings. Frog men are a bit more troublesome with a long range tongue strike, but Puss does pack a move where he can briefly lower his weapon and make an adorable face to stun most enemy types. You do need to be safe enough to use this without getting hurt, but since the tongue only goes so far you can reliably use this to get in and land the two strikes necessary to kill them. The sidescrolling action is lacking in most areas as attack options feel almost tacked on, a forward roll attack often not a good fit for the limited space you have to stand and most enemies actually want you closer so you’d be sacrificing your reach advantage to use this less than stellar maneuver. There is an aerial plunge with your blade that is used for platforming exactly two times and one time it is for a finicky optional section, but otherwise this tool that could let you get a good hit on enemies from above mostly finds use in killing stone golems who only take damage from it and the fight boils down to just repeating that easy action until finally they go down. Since enemies can block halls or hold keys you will have plenty of required action, but the bad guys in this game are actually better off when they’re platforming hazards like the flying pumpkins that require you to jump better to avoid them. In an actual fight, Shrek 2: Beg for Mercy!’s villains barely provide anything interesting due to their simplistic attack methods.

Puss doesn’t just rely on fights to get through a level, packing a double jump that gives him some room to move in the air and some area specific actions like sliding down ropes or attaching to special types of walls. He does pack the ability to view what’s below if you stand in place and hold down for a bit, although the pan doesn’t go too far and actually doesn’t account for every moment where dropping down can provide something useful or important. Usually when there is some form of blind jump it’s accompanied by something to ease yourself down with like a slippery wall you can still attach to, but descending down these is often an unsafe bet since it’s unclear where they’ll end, if there’s safe ground down there, or if an enemy might show up and knock you off your safe spot. Detection for swinging ropes, chains, vines, and ceiling handholds can make grabbing onto them after a jump a bit iffy at times as well, but thankfully on the whole the game slips mostly into mediocre platforming for Puss to engage with. His health is the main decider on whether you’ll succeed or fail, the cat able to take four hits before a full level retry will be necessary. Dropping down pits to your doom is possible though and sometimes looking for extras like the coins scattered around a level might mean you have to take a chance on a drop, but mostly the risk in Shrek 2: Beg for Mercy! comes from trying to stay safe as enemies bother you or hazards threaten you if you don’t time your movement right.

In a rather odd choice though, Puss in Boots isn’t the only playable character in this game. Both Shrek and Donkey are given devoted levels, but this isn’t to make team-focused puzzles like in Shrek 2. Each character is on their own in their stages, and while Puss has at least a few different little ideas floating around that can lead to variety within his stages, Shrek and Donkey have very little they can do and stages that still struggle to challenge those limited abilities. These levels are contextualized in the plot as moments of transit to explain how they ended up where Puss in Boots is, and the lack of inspiration seems to leak into the design of these stages too. Shrek can lift and transport objects and do a butt slam that can be used on bouncy objects to give him more height so his levels are usually just about moving a jumping aid in place to get you to the next simple set of platform jumps and enemies you can punch out with ease. Donkey manages to be even simpler, a better jumper than Shrek but lacking compared to Puss in Boots and his only special skill is the option to kick things across the ground. These levels are often just about getting to the end of a level and there’s not much in the way of puzzle solving, and since both these and the Puss stages lack any special conditions or pressures like a timer or ancillary goals, the game often feels slow and too low pressure.

Collecting coins is one of the things that can give a level a bit of life at least, the act of finding them all requiring a bit more exploration and careful ability use than the actual adventure. Coins also have a good purpose, there being four minigames you can unlock provided you get all the coins in the four sections of the story. These are all there just for the fun of playing them, but they do have a few different ideas in play. One has Puss needing to guard against incoming barrels, another has him slashing at the Three Blind Mice as they scurry about with them increasing in speed each time, and one has you using that aerial plunge to bounce off of Shrek’s head. The mouse game and barrel guarding one are decent endurance tests that get more difficult in time, although the fourth minigame, Duck and Cover, is a bit slow and easy since you just need to avoid slowly flying pumpkins that you are even allowed to attack if you feel they get too close. The Shrek focused game, Ogre Slayer, actually benefits most from an interesting choice, each minigame giving you the same health bar you have in the main adventure so that if you do mess up you can keep going until you’ve lost all of your life. The quest to collect the coins needed to unlock these minigames will probably cause you to rub against the game’s flaws more as blind jumps and weak fights will inevitably be more common while exploring every inch of a level, but it can help the game occasionally shake up its plain platforming as it expects a bit more out of you if you want some rewards.

THE VERDICT: Shrek 2: Beg for Mercy! puts the spotlight on Puss in Boots but he squanders it as the game’s emphasis on fighting enemies more often isn’t supported by good villain variety. Your attack options are simplistic and the foes don’t do much to require interesting approaches, the single shallow boss fight in particular a sorry little capstone to the adventure. The basic platforming as Puss can be a bit more bearable and involved even if it has some small design issues, but shifting away to play as Shrek and Donkey when their levels offer next to nothing interesting is a poor choice in a game that already feels like it’s lacking in creativity for how its limited story can unfold. Gathering the coins in a stage will give you a bit more of an actual challenge to engage with, but if you’re only interested in finishing a stage you’ll find little of interest impeding your adventure.

And so, I give Shrek 2: Beg for Mercy! for Game Boy Advance…

A BAD rating. While it sometimes provides some serviceable platforming when it decides to test Puss’s jumping and special navigational abilities a bit, you won’t really find much to sink your teeth into when it comes to the swashbuckling aspect of Puss’s limited journey to meet Shrek. I actually would put this less on Puss himself than the opposition he faces, many old faces from Shrek 2 on GBA returning when they were designed for a game where the protagonists weren’t built for fighting, so if Vicarious Visions had put in more enemies that can actually hold their own it could have made it so that you actually get into a decent duel from time to time instead of repelling skeletons with ease or bouncing on golem’s heads without any concerns. Completely removing the Shrek and Donkey levels feels like an obvious way to maintain focus, the stages not providing anything worthwhile and feeling more like a way to give you a break from Puss so you don’t realize the action isn’t evolving enough to keep the gameplay interesting. I don’t want to essentially say that this game should just keep repeating ideas from the previous title, but Shrek 2 on GBA knew how to wring more out of its elements by adding extra pressures or intertwining them, so if Puss was sometimes put under additional pressure with things like a need to be quick or cautious that could spice up some simplistic level design, and having a few more true bosses would be a better way to break from the monotony instead of having you play as one of two inferior characters. In fact, perhaps intermingling the minigames into the story would have worked better than them being optional, or even leaning into required exploration more while removing moments of confusion over whether you can safely drop down below would help keep the player interested. In its current state though, Shrek 2: Beg for Mercy! feels like it squandered its big draw and even failed to utilize elements from the previous game in the way that made them work before, its inferiority clear even if a fair bit of the adventure is just unexciting rather than awful.

While Puss in Boots was what lead to Shrek 2 on GBA finding its footing and becoming a decent game, that was because he worked within the system he was placed in. As a puzzle platforming character he offered many more options and his relationship to other characters in interconnected trials made for some more dynamic level designs. In Shrek 2: Beg for Mercy! though the other cast members are separated from the cat in levels they don’t get to do much in and the absence of involved puzzles means Puss has to lean on trying to make the platforming and action enjoyable on his own. The levels and opposition simply aren’t up to snuff in providing the required level of danger to make things thrilling or challenging though. While definitely not so bad you’ll beg for it to be over with, this mercifully short Shrek spinoff lacks the kind of charm its feisty feline lead exudes, his first go as a headliner an unfortunate flop.