Bubsy: The Woolies Strike Back (PS4)

Even before Bubsy 3D’s abysmal attempt to bring the platforming genre into the third generation made it one of the most infamous games of all time, the Bubsy brand wasn’t well respected. His 2D platformers felt aimless and Bubsy Bobcat himself came off as grating with his constant weak punchlines. When Billionsoft acquired a swathe of intellectual properties from Accolade though, Bubsy was sadly the most recognizable name in the bunch. So despite its toxic reputation, the Bubsy series would finally make its return 21 years after its last game with Bubsy: The Woolies Strike Back.

While Bubsy Bobcat himself definitely likes to make cheeky references to this game being a comeback attempt, the story itself is surprisingly plain. Bubsy has the famous Golden Fleece of myth fashioned into a yarn ball, but his old alien nemeses The Woolies attack and snag up all his yarn balls including the one fashioned from the Golden Fleece. Heading out to get them all back, Bubsy fights his way through a surprisingly small set of 11 levels and 3 boss battles, and in a weird choice, if you know some passwords you can just skip ahead even though the game autosaves. Lives are handled in an odd manner as well in that they’re level specific so grabbing extra ones won’t avail you in the long run, but since bringing back Bubsy at all was an odd choice, perhaps the eccentricities are fitting.

Bubsy’s platforming basics are simple and solid. Besides a normal jump, Bubsy can inexplicably glide by holding his arms out. The glide gives you a good degree of horizontal movement options and some aerial control so you can correct yourself if you miss an enemy or didn’t reach your destination, and by bouncing off an enemy’s head while jumping you can glide again. One of the weird aspects of Bubsy: The Woolies Strike Back though is how much the levels actually don’t put up much of a fight unless you are angling to grab all of the optional items. While levels have hundreds and hundreds of yarnballs you aren’t required to collect them all. Grabbing all the yarn balls or completing other optional goals like beating a level without dying once earns you a special badge, but those badges don’t impact the game’s outcome and don’t provide any other form of reward.

If you care little for the extras you can finish a lot of the levels in barely any time, but if you do take some time to collect all the yarn balls and the keys needed to open the Woolie Vaults in each level, the stages are more interactive and the small challenges constructed for you are often pretty alright. Grabbing yarn balls while avoiding rising and falling lava, utilizing platforms that rise or fall when you stand on them to navigate an aerial space, or sneaking off into a little alcove to dodge a constant stream of sand sharks all require a bit of platforming acumen and decent reflexes. A lot of them are still plain in how they recycle the small set of level design concepts and thus barely leave an impression, and besides an added element in climbing up specially designated walls, the game doesn’t get too creative with other ways to challenge you besides the gradual rollout of enemy types that don’t fundamentally change how you approach things.

Things do go from bland to bad on a somewhat regular basis though, primarily whenever Bubsy’s new pounce move is involved. Despite the game’s hero praising this new move as if it was some huge game changer, this unwieldy maneuver is best avoided due to its unreliability and inferiority to simply bouncing off an enemy’s head to deal damage. You do have to use it to break blocks which is usually a painless interaction free of any skill requirements, but one memorable moment has a small tunnel where you’ll die if you fall in the water but you need to pounce through a rock to cross. You need to time a jump after the pounce perfectly here or you’ll drown instantly, and if you do that jump too early you’ll bonk your head and drop into the drink anyway. The closest I ever got to losing all my lives in Bubsy: The Woolies Strike Back was in the final boss fight and in this little tunnel pounce challenge early in the adventure, the two probably equal in challenge since the boss fights often involve a lot of waiting for your moment to strike or learning a boss’s attack by dying to it so you can know how to position yourself next time it is used.

The pounce is a gamble against regular enemies too. If Bubsy is not spaced properly he will land in front of a Woolie and take damage. The pounce can be utilized in midair to use floating enemies like springboards to get to little alcoves, but for the most part you will just want to jump on an enemy to avoid odd spacing requirements or the fact you’ll follow through after a pounce lands successfully and you might not want to fling yourself forward that hard. Most dangers unfortunately fall into two categories though: enemies who are easily dealt with or ones you wish you could kill because they are bothersome like the Woolie UFOs with their repeatedly firing laser cannons. Pouncing on them won’t really make the simple enemies easier and can’t take down the foes you do want gone, so it’s best thought of as a rarely used hammer you need to break blocks with and that’s about it.

For the most part, Bubsy 3D is fairly easy, the game putting many of the game’s health pickup around in case you do get hit. Grab a T-Shirt and Bubsy will have a protective shield around him to absorb one hit and another hit after that will kill him. However, collecting shirts while the shield is up earns you extra lives, and usually those reserves will only feel important if you’re going for everything and it looks like dying to grab some yarn balls is preferable because you got impatient waiting for some timed platform or hazard movement. Big portions of levels can be skipped by simply gliding over all of the platforming segments and enemies, and checkpoints are so frequently placed you can sometimes even see two within jumping distance of each other. Without its optional collectibles, almost the entire game would be a cakewalk, and even then a majority of those can be more about putting in the time scaling walls or going off the beaten path for easily acquired yarn balls.

To try and give a bit more life to its dull platforming though, Bubsy: The Woolies Strike Back brings back the most famous aspect of its hero: his motormouth. Bubsy loves to quip, but the problem is the pool of jokes he whips out frequently is incredibly limited. Before you can even finish the tutorial you’ll likely hear him repeating one-liners, and the worst part of his voice line triggers is they can be for very common activities. Gliding is constant part of playing this game and it will trigger his jokes frequently, but hearing “Pilot’s license? What for?” and “Not flying? Oh wait, yes I am!” incessantly certainly doesn’t make its protagonist endearing. There is a slider in the menu to adjust how much Bubsy talks and you can make him outright silent, but the fact the game labels its highest frequency setting for vocals as simply “Bubsy” makes it seem like the game at least knows he can be annoying. It is strange they didn’t put in more voice lines if they were aware he would be constantly chattering during the game, but besides a few meta jokes about his reputation, you’re mostly just going to get the same set of weak lines over and over. The levels all have puns and jokes for names that don’t really indicate what’s inside the level often, but since levels don’t often have an overly pronounced gimmick on show or evoke their setting well, it’s not like this level naming choice denies us much. Unfortunately, the lame jokes don’t add much life to a game that definitely needed a shot in the arm to distract from all the plain platforming going on.

THE VERDICT: For a game packed to the brim with yarn, Bubsy: The Woolies Strike Back is incredibly threadbare. Its few decent platforming challenges are surrounded by monotonous and generic designs, the game is far too forgiving with how much can be skipped, and when things do get difficult it is often because the awful pounce maneuver lead to a slip up or a boss suddenly introduced a new move you couldn’t have known how to dodge. The humor certainly has little chance to land as well, and even if you find the wisecracks partially amusing, the fact they’ll repeat themselves already in only the first stage means it’s not really a game you can laugh at genuinely while still not being so awful you can laugh at its failures.

And so, I give Bubsy: The Woolies Strike Back for PlayStation 4…

A BAD rating. While Bubsy: The Woolies Strike Back gives you a slider to lessen the impact of Bubsy’s constant quipping on the play experience, it still ends up feeling repetitive and lacking in ideas. Platforming concepts are recycled with little added to them and the few moments that do show some potential can come and go fairly quickly or can be glided over if you don’t care about the optional collectibles. It’s actually shocking how much the game relies on yarn ball collection to try and add more depth to levels that would otherwise pack almost nothing of note. In many cases you have to make your own difficulty by pursuing things off the main path to the level’s end, but with some of the required challenges like the troublesome pounce over the water or boss fights who don’t telegraph their moves well enough you still run into issues even if you just want to rush through it.

Even after hearing the obnoxious delivery of the line “MC Bubster, the pounce master, in the game, YEAH!” repeatedly, it’s not the annoying bobcat protagonist that drags this game down, and the ability to turn down his attempts at cracking jokes will certainly be a blessing to most. However, without him, the game’s emptiness is on full show. The low difficulty, minimal amount of content, and general technical competence at least mean it isn’t a slog, but the hero’s annoying personality is perhaps the most interesting aspect to latch onto, and without it, you have nothing to distract from the dullness. Bubsy’s return won’t be the kind of disaster that sticks in player’s minds, but beyond the oddity of its existence and certain lines being hammered into your memory, there’s not much else memorable about this game that couldn’t even hit the mark of being mediocre.