Marsupilami: Hoobadventure (PS4)

I’ve mentioned in the past how disappointed I was as a kid to learn the Sega Genesis game Marsupilami was not the energetic cartoon adventure it looked like but a slow puzzle platformer, but over 25 years after that game’s release, it seems the game I expected to exist has finally come to be. Marsupilami: Hoobadventure is a fast-paced action platformer with no ponderous elephants you need to guide to the end of a level in sight, and while it gets there by cribbing a fair bit of ideas from games like Donkey Kong Country Returns, that certainly isn’t a bad starting point for making an exciting animal action game.

 

While the Sega Genesis Marsupilami game was seemingly more based on the Disney cartoon than the original Belgian comics, this game instead seems to almost be inspired by a still unreleased CGI cartoon revival of the brand. The cartoon stars a trio of creatures similar to the ones that star as the three playable protagonists in this game, the only really differences being their names. Punch, Hope, and Twister are three young animals of a fictional South American species known as Marsupilamis, their defining traits being leopard print fur with some variation in the colors and a prehensile tail many times the length of their own bodies that they can freely move to make all sorts of shapes. Sleeping soundly on the beaches of a country called Palombia, a washed up sarcophagus catches the eye of one of the little creatures who can’t help but prod it out of curiosity. Doing so ends up unleashing the sleeping spectral skeleton within, this ancient evil immediately setting off to hypnotize Palombia’s animal inhabitants to serve him. The Marsupilamis seem unaffected though and immediately take off to stop him and free the other fauna, but while the three playable creatures are functionally identical in skills and only really show small personality differences in how they react to beating a level, the main villain is actually a rather fun character. While not a single word is spoken, the body language and reactive expressions of the skeleton shows him to be a villain who delights in his silly villainy. You don’t see him too often and the boss levels he hosts are often more of a chase than a true confrontation, but his appearances are still fun because he manages to be a bit of a character despite the deliberate avoidance of dialogue.

To stop the skeleton once and for all though will involve the three Marsupilamis venturing from their home to areas filled with hypnotized animals, all the while working their way to the Mesoamerican inspired kingdom the skeleton has made for himself on the final island. Their prehensile tails are certainly their greatest tool, these limber little lemur-like creatures able to interact with the environment in a few ways beyond their natural jumping ability. If you want to speedily move through an area, pressing a button repeatedly will make them roll up in their tail so they can clear away grass for goodies or plow through weaker enemies with ease, speed in general being encouraged by the level design so long as you can quickly spot the safe path forward. Sometimes though you’ll need to put that tail to work assisting in aerial navigation, grabbing onto hooks to cross gaps with no ground or pulling yourself towards helpful toucans who will spit you off into the distance. On the ground that tail can also be used to smash through boxes or punch enemies, none of the uses too complex and many of them fitting into the flow of progressing through a level at a brisk pace until you encounter some danger that would be better tackled cautiously.

 

One thing about Marsupilami: Hoobadventure though is that it takes a while to really build up to more interesting and challenging level designs. The progression of new ideas happens at a leisurely pace, the first world having some aesthetic variety with things like a shoreline and South American city but not rolling out new concepts quickly enough to keep things consistently fresh. Many ideas tend to stick around well after their introductory level too, certain levels not even having a unique identity because they’re just a blend of ideas that you’ve seen before and will be seeing after. Thankfully, once you reach the second world things do start to push back against the player better as more dangerous ideas enter the picture. Early levels have things like parrots hovering in place and squirrels patrolling back and forth as passive dangers but soon you’ll have chameleons that spit gunk that you sometimes need to use in more time-sensitive jumping challenges or bats surrounded by odd energy that deny you space in the air. Giant rolling lava balls start to demand quicker movement and you have to start learning to time when you latch onto hooks as they start moving through aerial obstacle courses. Movement precision becomes emphasized more and more as the game picks up speed, but unfortunately this three world adventure didn’t even hit thirty true levels in total initially, although a post-release patch did add in some bonus dinosaur themed levels to bulk up the offerings. Luckily it does find its stride before the halfway point, and there are a few things in place to make sure even the breezy early stages have something to latch onto besides lush backgrounds and smooth controls.

 

In most level of Marsupilami: Hoobadventure there are five collectible feathers to grab, these requiring you to search around the level a little more rather than rushing towards the exit. These can be hidden behind false walls with a little clue for eagle-eyed players to pick up on, they might require a brief bit of slightly more demanding platforming to grab them, or they might have some time-sensitive pressure or optional side path that is less afraid to test the player’s abilities even early on. The feathers do have an interesting feature where you need to stay safe for a bit after grabbing them too, so while some are poised over pits, you’ll need to make sure you can both grab the feather and get back to solid ground if you want to keep them. These feathers help unlock special challenging stages so they are certainly worth grabbing, but levels also include hidden bonus rooms called Dojos. Despite the name there is no fighting in these Dojos, the game instead changing the vibrant art style into a silhouette look where you leap around a single screen environment trying to pass through every hoop that appears before time runs out. These are little areas that can train your movement abilities well, especially when it comes to timing midair hook grabs or weaving through deadly hazards in later Dojos, but an odd choice was made in reusing Dojo designs. Not only will familiar Dojos reappear in later levels, there are also Dojos available on the world map that use these same designs. Sometimes they will be made a bit harder with a new hazard or more hoops to clear, but these bonus games are still decent diversions that are only made unusual thanks to the recycling featured.

When the game does begin cranking up the difficulty level, Marsupilami: Hoobadventure goes from a game even young players can get through easily enough to one that will require quick reflexes and some solid mastery of your movement abilities to slip through the increasing number of hazards in your path. In one way though those early levels do prepare you beyond just giving you time to learn the ropes, as most levels in Marsupilami: Hoobadventure are flush with collectable floating fruit. 100 fruits will earn you an extra life and dying throws you back to the common enough checkpoints in a stage, but the abundance of these fruits means that even before I was halfway through world two I had the max amount of lives. 99 lives is a good way of the game getting away with the difficulty increase though, since while an experienced player will never be at risk losing so many, it does give a younger player the cushion needed to start to learn levels and overcome them. Additionally the game does offer a few difficulty settings, one fit for kids drawn in by colorful funny animals allowing you to take any amount of hits without dying while one for more hardcore players only gives you one hit before you are down. The normal difficulty gives you three hearts though, this still a bit generous considering how often health refills appear but pit drops and special circumstance can still feel like present dangers and a lot of the hypnotized wildlife either upset movement rhythm or are required platforming tools so their danger and importance isn’t only derived from dishing out damage.

 

Perhaps unsurprisingly the levels where you face off with the skeleton are some of the best, these more about trying to chase him down to pummel him at the end rather than an active fight. His movement means you can’t linger in place as the screen will leave you behind if you do, and with that extra time pressure and plenty of more dangerous enemy arrangements these can put up a good fight. If you did somehow need more lives there are special stages where you spend the tickets you earn for clearing Dojos to collect a bunch of fruits, and a speed run challenge for each level exists where getting the best time goes towards earning trophies and unlockables. Along with the extras gained from the feathers and bonus levels, you can add a bit more time to the game by trying to unlock the music and character models, but Marsupilami: Hoobadventure is unfortunately a short game that would have benefited more from continuing with more levels rather than adding some extra goals to its current batch of content.

THE VERDICT: Marsupilami: Hoobadventure takes a bit to get rolling and as a fairly short adventure it can’t quite afford to do so, but it finds its footing in time to provide a good batch of enjoyable and challenging stages. Early levels are kept from being too basic by the extra content to find like the feathers and Dojos and the smooth controls even give you the option to blitz through simpler segments if you want to get to the juicier content later on. While it may be a bit slow to integrate new design ideas into its stages, Marsupilami: Hoobadventure does provide an energetic experience once it s sure you’re able to keep up with its approach to platforming action.

 

And so, I give Marsupilami: Hoobadventure for PlayStation 4…

A GOOD rating. Were Marsupilami: Hoobadventure a longer game, you wouldn’t even really need to mention that the first world is more of a simple introduction to the gameplay and some fundamental hazards and mechanics. In a longer experience such a start would ease you in before it finds its footing and sticks with it for the rest of the run time, but Marsupilami: Hoobadventure’s small stage count does mean a fair bit is spent with those levels that are meant to ease you in. It does avoid being absolutely tame if you make sure to go for feathers and bonuses and once things do take off it becomes a more fitting platforming challenge. It could be a good way to introduce young players to this particular type of platformer, the emphasis on finding a rhythm to your forward movement key to beating those later stages where a missed tail latch or slow navigation of tight spaces can spell doom. I do wonder why this game came out now if the Marsupilami cartoon it’s almost a tie-in to is still on the shelf and a little more development time could have avoided things like reused Dojo designs, but Marsupilami: Hoobadventure’s main problem is certainly not a bad one to have, the player wanting more of a good thing because it’s enjoyable when it does start showing you what ideas it has for fast-paced platforming trials.

 

I didn’t want to spend too much time laying into the many obvious parallels it has with Donkey Kong Country Returns, but Marsupilami: Hoobadventure has barrel cannons in the form of the toucan launchers, levels end with a fruit eating button mashing moment similar to how you pound bosses in Donkey Kong Country Returns, hypnotized animals are a plot point in that older game, and the floating fruits work just like bananas to the point the game even has dragonflies appear to drop them in harder to grab places in the same way little banana fairies did in its inspiration. In some ways this is more of a good thing for fans of that game even though it’s easier and simpler in many areas, but Marsupilami: Hoobadventure also has a lot more focus on aerial maneuvering with many ring latching moments and the Dojos, those Dojos even being a step over Donkey Kong Country Returns’s bonus rooms. You would certainly pick a Donkey Kong Country game over this if you wanted the tighter and more challenging type of platforming they both share, but this can be a taste of a different flavor for that flow-focused forward moving type of play. Even if it’s a bit flagrant in where its inspiration came from, I am certainly happier that Marsupiliami: Hoobadventure took more from another enjoyable game rather than calling back to Marsupilami’s first video game adaptation that disappointed me all those years ago.