Gumby vs. the Astrobots (GBA)

Almost since the turn of the millennium, nostalgic intellectual properties have seen a surge in adaptations and revivals, but there’s one fairly well known franchise that hasn’t really seen much of a spotlight. Gumby’s star rose in the 50s and 60s with television episodes that featured creative use of stop-motion animated clay characters who happily transformed their bodies into new shapes and objects, and after reruns helped it catch on again later it managed to get a new series in the 1980s and even a feature film in 1995. However, since that movie he’s basically just been merchandised with almost no new content produced since… besides an inexplicable Game Boy Advance game called Gumby vs. the Astrobots released in 2005. Why Namco thought the iron might be hot for the brand is a mystery, I even thought it must have been a tie-in for some planned revival of the franchise but can find no evidence to support that. Instead, we get the famous clay man appearing in a short GBA side-scrolling platformer with no clear explanation as to why 2005 was the year he finally got his first video game.

The Astrobots Gumby goes up against don’t seem to be particularly prolific characters across the multiple Gumby television series, but they do lend themselves quite well to being video game antagonists. While Professor Kap is working on a device that can control the Astrobots, Gumby’s more notable trouble-making adversaries The Blockheads invade and switch the robots to their side, using them to spread chaos. One of the first actions of these reprogrammed machines is to interrupt a picnic where Gumby is eating with his family, his horse Pokey, and a dragon-like creature called Prickle, the robots capturing all of Gumby’s allies and taking them off to new worlds. These worlds are contained within story books that the clay characters can enter and exit as they please, and while this does sound like it has the potential for some interesting 2D platforming stages, most of the levels just feature generic themes rather than recognizable literature with book titles like The Magic Castle, African Safari, and The Wild West being among these oddly broad books.

The set up incorporates plenty of recognizable characters from the show and and explains the reason for the action well enough, but while things do start off with just some light humor to break up the exposition, Gumby vs. the Astrobots has some rather surprising moments appear in the story that start to make completing the small selection of worlds more interesting. It seems each family member has ended up in the hands of an unusual villain, and while they may look simple like the wizard with his cliche design or Count Dracula putting in an appearance in the Transylvanian Tales book, the dialogue reveals some fascinatingly odd angles. The wizard who kidnaps Gumby’s parents seems outright gleeful at the idea of conducting painful experiments on them, but Dracula definitely takes the cake as Gumby finds his friend Goo being serenaded by the famous vampire only for her to say the music is so terrible her ears are hurting. Gumby quickly turns into a platform with a propeller on the bottom and invites her to hop aboard and start throwing clay bombs down at him to stop him from singing, this absolutely wild set up for a gameplay type that is only featured here perhaps the clearest signal that Gumby vs. the Astrobots has a bit more to give than just another licensed 2D platformer.

When you’re not pelting Dracula with clay bombs, most of Gumby’s adventure involves him jumping around levels filled with enemy Astrobots. While these mean machines don’t often directly attack Gumby, both our clay protagonist and his metallic foes are fairly large on the GBA’s small screen. Luckily there are no blind jumps or unfair moments tied to these big character sprites, but it does mean that if a robot is on screen you will have to take it seriously since they’re often placed to bump into you while you’re navigating the stage. Sometimes bouncing across their heads is important to getting across an area and Gumby vs. The Astrobots is fairly lenient in not having you do such risky maneuvers above death pits often, but as you explore you do need to respect your foes or time your leaps right if they’re a particularly mobile variation like the spring-jumping or flying forms.

The enemies in Gumby vs. the Astrobots are a present enough danger that you do often need to stop and jump onto their head to make sure you can safely progress, and they’re spaced out enough that this simplistic approach to ridding yourself of enemies doesn’t slow the game down much. It is a pretty straightforward interaction in most cases though and this is true of a lot of the action in the game, but you are being kept active and the game does a good job of lightly progressing how platforming is done as you move into new books. Gumby can start to get new abilities as the game progress, distorting his clay body into shapes that allow him to approach level navigation in different ways. He gets the ability to curl into a ball to enter tight spaces or even launch himself off curved ramps to reach high places, he gets an ability to stick to walls so he can hop between them in narrow shafts, and he’ll even get the option to briefly control his aerial momentum by turning his feet into propellers. Once these skills are added to the mix you find the levels changing accordingly, the game expecting you to be able to platform better so walls will have dangerous spikes on them to punish you if you don’t do the wall jumps properly and the game becomes less reticent to place deadly drops or dangers in your path while jumping since you can correct yourself as needed.

By slowly rolling out these new abilities for Gumby and focusing on testing how you integrate them into your movement, Gumby vs. the Astrobots fills its fairly short 2 hour run time with constant small novelties. The tests of your abilities aren’t too creative, but they differ enough that it’s easy to press forward to see what you’ll be doing next. You’ll never be put through your paces in executing them, and sometimes there are rough patches when the game doesn’t register your ball roll well for the ramp jumps or how it can be hard to discern if Gumby can stick to a certain wall, but mostly the action rarely makes waves but mixes things up enough that curiosity and mild execution challenges can carry it to its conclusion.

There are some moments where Gumby vs. the Astrobots really changes up how it is played as well, the earlier instance with Dracula getting clay-bombed an example since that is the only portion you can fly and it’s presented as a chase where you need to keep the vampire from singing you out of the sky. The Wild West level features a mine cart race where missing jumps is a present danger since the game doesn’t try to be too easy even on its easiest setting, although the game is never really hard either. Some bosses are just platforming puzzles and the final boss is a bit of a let down by leaning more on hard to avoid attacks rather than executing the tricks needed to win. Floating throughout most levels are also ice cream cones that can be collected for extra lives that aren’t too vital but you’ll probably need a good stock of them all the same due to the decent balance of challenge on show. Levels keep track of how many you’ve grabbed so there’s a small completionist goal attached if you want to squeeze more out of Gumby’s game, but they add a bit more to level navigation as you spend the time to snag them, are guided by them on how to progress in the more maze-like or heavily vertical stages, and they can lead you to goodies like free lives or the pie slices you use as health. Those health pickups are perhaps only lightly important since you’ll likely tackle danger carefully due to the game rarely necessitating fast movement but the pie slices are spaced out enough that you can’t just power your way through the well-placed enemies.

THE VERDICT: Gumby vs. the Astrobots isn’t expansive or innovative and the generic level themes feel like a waste of the idea that the game worlds are inside books, but it is also a 2D platformer that keeps rolling in new abilities and it presents some scenarios with such fascinating strangeness that it can at least hold your attention. Enemies are placed well enough to pose a threat and sometimes you’ll find yourself with an unexpected gameplay shift or a level that’s fairly different in concept than the one before it, so while its range of ideas never elevate it beyond adequacy, it does excel at shifting things up just enough to make you want to see more with no major flaws barring you from indulging that curiosity.

And so, I give Gumby vs. the Astrobots for Game Boy Advance…

An OKAY rating. In the same way Crystal’s Pony Tale made up for its shallow gameplay by holding your attention just enough with the desire to see what’s coming next, Gumby vs. the Astrobots doesn’t lose the player because its competent platforming action keeps going in new and sometimes intriguingly strange directions. Throwing clay bombs at Count Dracula is a simple challenge though despite the absurd concept, but things like the mine cart chase still know they need to scatter enough danger in their simple designs to avoid becoming boring. Gumby’s frequent acquisition of new abilities allows levels to embrace different concepts as the way you move continues to expand, and even though it does indulge in the tediousness of slowly moving vertical platforms at times, for the most part the pace is kept moderate because the opposition and platforming trials can be moved through quickly but not mindlessly. I even believe quite a bit of the humor will land with young players and the absurdity can help older gamers stay on board just hoping to see what strangeness awaits them next in the plot. Perhaps because of the brand’s possibility of appealing to young players the developers never took the gameplay mechanics a step further, the game not packing in any really exciting action moments since it mostly tries to do everything competently rather than finding creative uses for its evolving gameplay, but those shifts do save it from being mired in bland repetition.

Certainly not an experience worth seeking out but one that can hold your interest if it does somehow fall into your lap, Gumby vs. the Astrobots is a strange return for the clay character but not a failed one. Most of its gameplay works for its intended purpose even though it never pushes the envelope. The game was clearly molded with some thought, but a bit like its protagonist, it has a clear but not quite distinct shape. It can become many different things, but it doesn’t have one that it excels at but benefits from that flexibility so it isn’t wholly unappealing. Gumby vs. the Astrobots isn’t the kind of game that leaves a strong impression, but you can walk away after completing it without feeling like you wasted your time, a simple amusement that prods your curiosity and keeps your fingers active for about the length of a film. This certainly wasn’t some grand return for this familiar intellectual property, but at least Gumby’s first and currently only video game outing can hold the attention of any fans curious about this inexplicable piece of Gumby merchandise.