The Smurfs: Mission Vileaf (PS5)

3D platformers will often feature enemies to fight or impede your progress, but when a game in the genre wants to target young players, the question can arise if such things are appropriate, especially since the tiny blue forest folk known as The Smurfs are already the type to avoid violence in their cartoons and comics. The Smurfs: Mission Vileaf comes up with a rather interesting solution to this question, the player not hurting the aggressive plants they encounter but healing their corruption with their Smurfizer spray. While some of these plants poof out of existence after “healed” and others can be sucked up and fired at each other, the game still couches the action in a gentler concept that feels appropriate for its heroes rather than having them bash their way to saving the day.

 

One day as The Smurfs harmoniously live in their forest home, strange purple plants begin to appear, sapping the life of nearby vegetation and even trapping some Smurfs as the odd corruption spreads. The source of this specific infection is a plant known as the Vileaf, but thankfully the Smurfs quickly concoct a device known as the Smurfizer that can clear away the corruption. However, to purify the Vileaf itself will involve a more powerful concoction than the normal spray, and so different ingredients from across the land must be collected so they can take out the problem at its source. This story set-up and important developments are actually conveyed through a storybook framing with plenty of rhymes and silly jokes, but that doesn’t meant the game is lacking in dialogue between recognizable Smurf character both during action and when exploring areas like Smurf Village. Most Smurfs are defined by one characteristic and the game is happy to indulge in displaying a Smurf’s unique personality. Lazy Smurf can be found hidden in different areas after sneaking off to take a nap, Chef Smurf always tries to find a way to work in food terminology or cooking puns, and Brainy is quick to show of his intellect or brag about it. It all feels like a very authentic picture of the classic characters, and while it is meant as a tie-in to the 2021 animated series specifically, that show also uses traditional depictions and ideas so this can work as both a nostalgic throwback or a timely adaptation. Besides a few moments where it seems one character is given a line meant for another, the game’s voice acting and simple humor do suit its colorful adventure well and give it some extra life.

In The Smurfs: Mission Vileaf, you will switch which Smurf you control depending on where you are in the adventure. Hefty, Brainy, Smurfette, and Chef all play the hero at different parts but they all control the same since this platformer’s action is based entirely around the Smurfizer they find themselves carrying around. The Smurfizer spray is an important tool for every type of activity you encounter along your journey. Its most common use will be simply spraying corrupted grass you find, the player needing to clear full patches to make large roadblocks disappear. There is a good deal of exploring a space you find yourself in, jumping around the natural environment or whatever structures the Smurfs have built there to get goodies or make progress, but one thing that makes The Smurfs: Mission Vileaf consistently engaging is that your adventure constantly gives you little things to do. Spraying the purple grass to clean it up keeps you busy as you move along even in simple areas, the player given a little time to do something simple and satisfying if they like before they move onto the next platforming challenge or battle. Areas you clean up stay clean as well and seeing the forest return to its pristine state is already nice enough, but you can start to get rewards for clearing entire areas like new colors for your spray.

 

Areas you pass through often have much more than grass to clean as well. Many spaces contain plenty of little challenges where you’ll earn a special ingredient at the end that goes towards improving your Smurfizer. While it takes a while for the upgrades to become available, these side activities can actually put your problem solving and speed to the test. None are too advanced, but you’ll still be able to do things like identify the quickest path to spray a group of mushrooms in a limited time or figure out how to reach new areas, and as your abilities begin to expand, you’ll also need to make smart use of the environment to acquire collectibles. Your Smurfizer eventually gets powers like a hover and a speedy sprint that open up new ways to get around accommodating environments, but managing your smurf spray reserves can be part of these navigation puzzles as well. This is why the upgrades can pay off though, giving you better control over the new abilities or deeper spray reserves that can give you wiggle room in gathering goodies. Smurfizer spray does thankfully passively recover rather quickly when not in use so long as you don’t drain the tank completely, and so even if you flub an attempt to grab a collectible you can always try again fairly quickly.

Clean up and collecting goodies isn’t the main crux of the adventure to wipe out the Vileaf’s influence, but it is a nice supplement to a journey that still has some decent obstacles on the main path. You’ll need to have good timing and figure out ways to alter the environment to make progress, although rarely is there much a sense of danger. Healing hearts are easy to find and most enemies aren’t really going to threaten you much, although there is at least a steady rollout of new plant monsters that require a bit more to take out than just spraying their face until they disappear. A quick fight is never really a bother to encounter but they don’t really demand much from you, so instead the greater focus thankfully remains more on platforming challenges. A good amount of location variety exists, the forest dominating the early levels but soon you’ll reach Wild Smurf’s treetop buildings, a swamp, and even human-owned buildings. It is a bit funny how the game has characters constantly reiterate the same possible explanation for why there are currently no humans in Cooking Pot Castle, but the different settings do mean your minuscule heroes can go from exploring nature to finding clever ways to navigate spaces that were built for the far larger humans.

 

The Smurfs: Mission Vileaf doesn’t really drag because it finds a good mix of new important activities as well as the persistent presence of side challenges and cleaning work, but near the end it does start to strain its simple platforming a bit with a few weak ideas. One area near the end strips away the Smurfizer’s powers so all you can really do is platform around a space and look at all the collectibles you have to skip because your power was taken away, but the game does let you return to areas and most do have some activities you can only properly engage with once you have the full set of powers you acquire over the course of the adventure. A bit more of a real problem emerges in the game’s final area. For certain sections, the wizard Gargamel will be searching the shelves you’re walking across, a lantern moving around that will lead to an immediate death should you be caught in its glow for about a second. Hiding behind things as he passes is a fine enough idea, but Gargamel’s movements aren’t always predictable or reasonable, and this area is also filled with grass to spray and collectibles to grab. Sometimes the lantern will inexplicably lurch to right where you are and lead to your death if you try to engage with these elements, while other times you can freely spray the grass and he won’t notice. There may be something involving sound at play but it doesn’t seem consistent, and outmaneuvering the light while trying to engage with the many activities laid out before you becomes frustrating because of this. The Smurfs: Mission Vileaf does also have a rather weak cooperative play mode where player two floats around as a little robot that can’t engage with any of the plentiful platforming elements, but when played in single player it is a mostly smooth experience despite some late game experiments that didn’t pan out.

THE VERDICT: The Smurfizer was a stroke of genius when it comes to designing The Smurfs: Mission Vileaf. Multiple Smurfs are able to utilize the same set of interesting navigational abilities that play well with spaces built for challenging forward progress while providing plenty of collectibles and areas to clean, the player frequently given something of at least minor importance to do as they move along. It can be rather easy at times, the battles don’t put up too much of a fight and the one area where it gets rough is because of the poorly executed lantern evasion segments, but mostly the game keeps the player involved and tests them with low pressure puzzles that make continuing forward into its colorful cartoon world just engaging enough.

 

And so, I give The Smurfs: Mission Vileaf for PlayStation 5…

An OKAY rating. While trying to evade Gargamel stands out as an outright ill-conceived segment, it’s neither something awful enough to weigh the game down nor is it something that holds the game back from getting a higher rating. The Smurfs: Mission Vileaf’s generally breezy approach to obstructing you is where it can feel like the game has more room to grow, the challenges requiring some work to solve and overcome but not to such a degree they’re exciting the player or really making them think. The game doesn’t hold your hand or make it to easy to progress though, you still need to execute things right or notice things in the environment to progress or grab a collectible, but the game avoids having too much downtime by giving you the ongoing task of trying to clean up every area you explore. The task to purify grass keeps you looking around the environment and the areas you’re in often make sure there’s more to do than just spray things and move along, the adventure a good deal meatier because there’s an incentive to briefly go off the beaten path to grab something useful. There are certainly times where it’s quite easy to just point yourself in the direction of a problem and solve it without much thought or struggle, but things average out nicely enough that there’s never a truly dull stretch to be found. The extra character granted by interacting with different Smurfs also gives the game a bit more life and energy, the humor and presentation certainly in line with a children’s cartoon but it is pleasant and unafraid of its traditional sensibilities. No one ever gets on Chef Smurf’s case for always working in a reference to food prep and so it’s cute to see how he’ll frame a situation next time rather than the game ever being afraid it might be a bit corny.

 

The Smurfs: Mission Vileaf adapts The Smurfs brand into a video game quite well even if there was certainly room for it to push its mechanics further to make it more enjoyable on its own merits. You do get a faithful presentation of the characters and world and one with some creative albeit simple ways to keep you involved along your journey. People who want a game based around The Smurfs could ask for more, but this adventure still has its moments and feels like a good amount of thought was put into making its gameplay systems interesting to engage with. Both this approach to area design and the Smurfizer itself could have been the cornerstone of an excellent 3D platformer, but even with its more limited ambition, The Smurfs: Mission Vileaf can still provide enough worth doing with how it chose to implement them.