Ben 10 (PS4)

Starting in 2005, Ben 10 is not only Cartoon Network’s longest running original franchise but a fairly lucrative one as well. In the original series, 10 year old Ben Tennyson travels the country with his cousin Gwen and their Grandpa Max, the young hero utilizing a watch-like device called the Omnitrix to transform into different alien species to right whatever wrongs the trio come across. Later series would see his device grow in power and Ben grow older and face more universal threats, but in 2016 Cartoon Network decided to take things back to the original formula with a new series that used the same name as the original cartoon. To tie in with this reboot, an action game was released for the then current set of game consoles, but while the show was taking things back to basics, the game might have leaned a bit too hard into being basic.

Ben 10 for PlayStation 4 plays less like a continuous adventure and more like a set of three television episodes with hardly any link between them. While going about his day with his family, Ben will run into one the show’s supervillains up to no good and set out to foil their plans, the voice acted cutscenes seeming to capture the television show’s simple humor well. The villains are goofy, Ben and Gwen are bickering and acting like kids their age, and nothing is ever too serious, although it features a simplistic brand of humor that will probably only appeal to young players. The three villains you encounter vary in how interesting they are, the game starting off with Zombo, an evil clown who saps happiness from people but doesn’t really seem to have much personality for such an over the top character concept. Queen Bee’s middle segment at least sets her up as a rather demented television host who kidnaps people to serve as the studio audience for T.V.’s first bee-hosted program, but the Weatherheads are the ones with the best gimmick of the bunch. These robotic villains may have the least interesting plan in just making the weather go wild, but the way they talk is so absurd it’s hard not to find delightful. Pretty much all they want to talk about is how they’d be experiencing an emotional reaction to whatever is happening if they had the capability to do so, and this repeated specific denial makes for a nice last batch of villains for a game that wraps up without anything particularly conclusive.

Despite its action focus, Ben 10 features an exceptionally bland combat system at its core, and with no real puzzles or other interruptions to the repeated enemy beatdowns along the way, the brawling does become repetitive quickly. Ben will spend the battles in one of his ten aliens forms that you can swap between any time you like after they are arbitrarily added to your repertoire with no story justification or even at reasonable points between areas. Your attack button is always used for a fairly basic combo that rarely feels like it packs a lot of impact, and since most of the fighting is done with this, the aliens you’ll want to use are likely going to be the ones that handle this aspect best. The blue speedster form of XLR8 can deal blows rapidly so you can often mash your attack to get through a lot of the tedious battles in your path, but the vine-focused Wildvine’s basic attacks are so slow and sloppy that you’re likely to be ganged up on while you’re just trying to do your normal combos. Jump attacks exist as well but won’t do too much for a character if their basic attacks aren’t solid.

Funnily enough, the small but smart alien form Grey Matter only has a little device he launches blasts from, but despite having such a plain attack, the strength and speed of it make him better than more muscular characters like the self-descriptive Four Arms. All of the alien forms have a special ability as well though that can make some of them at least situationally useful. That usefulness might just be for something like having the rolling-focused Cannonbolt who is too slow for effective combat leap off ramps or the flying bug Stinkfly fly over gaps rather than come out to utilize his sloppy attack chains. Four Arms, despite being essentially your default alien, actually has one of the limpest alien powers, the four-armed brute hefting an enemy up and lightly tossing them away like he was moving a pillow across the room. Diamondhead achieves a good middle ground when it comes to his regular attacks and his alien power, the long range diamond darts good for pestering far away enemies between whaling away on the ones that close in, and the armored water alien Overflow makes up for a middle of the road attack combo by having a divebomb that’s good for dealing with crowds. All aliens have an ultimate move that you eventually earn enough energy to execute that will clear out a crowd when used, this only really varying in animation but always functionally the same.

A fire based alien form Ben gets access to though is completely kneecapped by the game’s poor coding. Heatblast is your first form that can utilize projectile attacks, but the fireballs can sometimes get stuck in midair or pass through enemies ineffectively. There are parts of the level geometry like stone walls you can sometimes walk right through, and while it’s not actually a glitch, you can game the enemy’s spawn system once you realize they always appear in reference to Ben’s current position. In an elevator portion of the game where new enemies joined at different intervals, the fact I stood next to the edge lead to half of the enemies appearing over a drop and plummeting to their doom immediately. This little trick doesn’t have many uses, but anything that helps alleviate the tedious combat is a nice tool to have even if it’s not an intentional design aspect.

Ben 10 does try to put in a few more ideas to make its combat and aliens a bit more than the barest of brawlers. Destroying objects in the environment and beating baddies will give you green orbs that can go towards upgrading your aliens, but too many of these upgrades leave little impact or are rarely going to help out. For example, a laser focused form that can travel through shadows named Upgrade sounds like he’d be perfect for advancing through this system, but all his upgrades are related to things like dealing more damage if you only hit one enemy with your laser rather than just giving you a more tangible boost for that effort you put in breaking objects. Upgrading Four Arms’s throw doesn’t make it pack any more punch, but then characters like Diamondhead get upgrades that can restore your health with simple attacks and you’re further funneled towards a few efficient but unexciting forms.

To try and make you play differently though, sometimes enemy encounters contain a special condition where you’ll earn more upgrade points if you complete it. These can be so simple you might as well do them like utilizing the very basic counter system that doesn’t deal enough damage to use often or they might ask you to avoid damage so that things could be a little harder. Regular enemies do come in different types like ones that attack from afar, spider men who drop sticky traps, and characters who detonate when they’re close to dying, but you just need to make sure you’re hitting foes enough to keep the dangerous ones from utilizing their better moves. The battle goals might make you whip out an alien you haven’t used often for a bit of an artificial excuse to reintegrate them, and it does seem to favor ones you don’t use much based on how often these battle conditions involved Wildvine for me, but the fundamentals of the fight were still essentially the same. Boss fights sadly don’t bring in any more excitement, always being about dodging simple attack patterns or beating up regular enemies until the boss has left themselves vulnerable. For a game so heavily based around combat, it doesn’t seem like Ben 10 tried to do much besides hurl a bunch of enemies in your path to work your way through.

THE VERDICT: For an exceptionally young fan of the show, Ben 10 might hold their attention because they can mindlessly mash the attack button to victory. However, bad coding can undermine alien forms like Heatblast while attacks from series staples like Four Arms can feel incredibly unsatisfying. Even players who are just about Ben’s age will notice how rigid some aliens feel and how the game is just a constant stream of generic battles and adults can definitely see the failed attempts at depth with the underwhelming upgrade system. While not quite a failure for all ages since the jokes and simplicity might work for some of its target demographic, Ben 10 feels almost more like a proof of concept rather than a finished product thanks to how shoddy and unpolished everything is.

And so, I give Ben 10 for PlayStation 4…

A TERRIBLE rating. Designing for the standards of the youngest of young players can lead to a game lacking in a lot of substance, but Ben 10 also feels like it was built without a lot of care. Every alien, even if they’re going to have the same generic attack combo, should at least be fun to play as. They should at least be functional, something Heatblast can’t claim to be. They should have a power that draws you back to them, unlike Wildvine whose power is a small twirl and his normal attacks are already rigid and a poor choice for handling the groups of baddies the game keeps tossing at you. Using Cannonbolt’s roll attack is unwieldy for something kids are meant to latch onto, Four Arms’s throw is shockingly soft in impact, and the upgrades rarely do much to salvage these less exciting alien forms. A child is likely to be funneled towards the pure efficiency of an alien like XLR8 or Diamondhead where the game starts to struggle to put up a good fight unless you ignore an obvious danger and bosses aren’t big enough expansions on the difficulty level to feel like satisfying climaxes to the game’s three episode structure. You can at least say the writing for the scenes is fun enough for a young audience, but when the actual game feels like it might fall apart if you perform certain simple actions, you really need to ask yourself if it might be better to look back on Ben 10’s gaming history and find a different simplistic brawler that has more polish put into it.

A reboot is always going to be a little contentious as it tosses away built up worlds and characters in favor of going back to a simpler start, but whatever your feelings are on the show, the 2016 Ben 10 series’s tie-in game does a disservice to the franchise in general. It’s not trying to capture the thrill kids might imagine shifting into some powerful aliens could be and its cut corners are loudly on display. It really feels like the Ben 10 game we got was meant to show what a game based on the series could be rather than the intended finished product, but whatever the development history is behind it, it doesn’t change the fact the game misses the mark on action almost entirely and only has a bit of the show’s personality present to offset its procession of repetitious battles.