The Smurfs 2: The Prisoner of the Green Stone (Xbox Series X)

With The Smurfs: Mission Vileaf, Microids concocted a rather decent 3D platformer thanks to the Smurfizer spray, a tool that added some navigational tricks to your movement while also providing a secondary task in cleaning up the environment and taking out corrupted plants. The Smurfs 2: The Prisoner of Green Stone serves as a sequel to that title and tries a similar approach with the new SmurfoMix device, but rather than building on the movement skills of the Smurfizer, the SmurfoMix is primarily a combat weapon, turning this 3D platforming adventure into something closer to a third-person shooter. It sounds like a bit of a violent turn for the usually peaceful little blue people, but The Smurfs 2: The Prisoner of Green Stone still makes sure to say that the CrystoBeasts you’re taking out are not animals to be killed but manifestations of the volatile power of the Green Stone.

 

The SmurfoMix itself wasn’t even meant to be a combat weapon at all first. Handy Smurf was hoping to make a tool to create food in a flash but lacked the magical power to fuel it. Learning that the wizard Gargamel had a strong alchemical stone that could potentially power the device, Handy infiltrates the Smurf-hating wizard’s hovel to try and pilfer it only to shatter it instead and release the magical being that was contained within: Stolas. Stolas immediately departs, unleashing its power on the nearby enchanted forest, snowy mountains, and even surprisingly a volcano, leaving behind a magical residue that causes green crystals to form as well as the CrystoBeast creatures. Luckily, with a bit of Green Stone in the SmurfoMix, you can destroy the crystals and beasts and recycle their energy, but to try and track Stolas, the Smurfs form an uneasy alliance with Gargamel despite having different goals. Gargamel wants Stolas back under his control, but the Smurfs realize early that Stolas might have resented his captivity and hope to find a more peaceful long term solution than containment.

For this quest to try and stop Stolas’s rampage and find what’s best for everyone, there are a few hiccups in the translation that are amusing but ultimately harmless. The English subtitles are sometimes quite different than the voice acting, down to what’s being said having very different tones or even not connecting into the full conversation properly. The voice acting seems to be the better story to follow for its clarity and clear intent, and it doesn’t have odd errors like leaving in untranslated French. It does, however, lead to an unintentionally humorous moment where Dimwitty Smurf, in trying to explain how the Smurf language substitutes the word “Smurf” for other terms, has all his dialogue during that explanation written out in a different language. Dimwitty Smurf also unfortunately has a rather obnoxious “dumb guy” voice that can make the section of the game where you play as him a bit rough, but all four playable Smurfs will inevitably repeat action lines rather often despite the voice acting generally being a nice touch during other moments.

 

Regardless of which Smurf you happen to be playing as, all four are unified by their reliance on the SmurfoMix. The main function of the device will be as a sort of automatic gun, firing blasts of green magical energy at a rapid reliable pace. However, since it is designed mostly as a weapon, the only other function the standard fire has outside of combat is to break up the green crystals infesting the areas you explore. This gives you a bit more of a reason to consider the places you pass through as some crystals are hidden in treetops or down alternate paths, and destroying crystals will give you resources for upgrading the SmurfoMix, although unfortunately many of the upgrades to things like power and shot speed will just be to keep pace with the increasing durability of the CrystoBeasts. CrystoBeasts can take on a few different forms like little beetles, larger beetles, mushroom men, flying bugs, and the rare giant moth or toad. Unfortunately, after you play through the first chunk of game as the female Smurf called Storm, you’ve basically seen every type of enemy in the game and yet you’re not quite one-third of the way through yet. The Smurfs 2: The Prisoner of Green Stone does try to provide new battlefields to make facing the same foes a bit less repetitive, providing high grounds or cover and portals you can hop through make traversing them a bit more interesting than running around and shooting. Unfortunately, this doesn’t shake up the action all that much, and rather than only including more combat when there’s a good idea for how a fight can be designed, it feels like fights are thrown in thoughtlessly to avoid too many quiet periods where you’re not shooting CrystoBeasts. Even the four playable Smurfs practically complain about it, Storm, Brainy, Dimwitty, and Handy all having some variation on “And it goes on and on…” to complain about the constant waves of similar enemies you face all too often.

Thankfully, your green shots aren’t your only means of fighting foes. When you find special plants in the world, you can suck up their fruits to gain a secondary fire. StickAll is a honey-like substance that can stick foes in place to immobilize them, PushAll provides a bouncing blue shot that knocks back foes when it detonates, and CatchAll can connect CrystoBeasts to each other or the environment in a way that can stun them or pull them into danger. You can only have one of these at a time and unlike the default green shots, they overheat your weapon if you fire them for too long. Upgrading these can be a bit more rewarding since they get new features like the StickAll shots homing in better or the PushAll sticking to a foe before it detonates, although they are still going to need power boosts to keep up with the new variants on the same foes where the only difference is the CrystoBeast takes more damage to destroy. Each of the three extra shot types is used for very mild puzzle solving, such as using CatchAll to pull an object out of your way or PushAll to push it out of your way, but much like CrystoBeast variants, the range of puzzles you’ll solve dries up fairly early on. Bosses are sadly in the same boat, the game only containing two real bosses that you fight repeatedly. The less common one would be the giant version of the toad enemy, but the other is Stolas, the alchemical being faced at least once by each Smurf and only with a new trick or two each time. Each Smurf does at least have a unique power to make playing as them feel a little different, although something like Brainy’s straightforward alchemical bomb is much better than Dimwitty’s carrot lure, partly because the carrot lure, while making CrystoBeasts docile, also makes them hop around and harder to hit due to their excitement.

 

One area where The Smurfs 2: The Prisoner of Green Stone shows it could have designed a more interesting adventure though are its Challenge Portals. Purple portals off the beaten path will take you to special challenge zones that feel more deliberate in design and can even use the regular enemies to decent effect. Challenge Portals are timed fights where getting the best rewards will require adept movement and mastery of the SmurfoMix’s alternate shot types, some not even worth attempting seriously until you’ve beat the game and unlocked all upgrades. With a timer asking you to be quick and efficient in movement during your CrystoBeast zapping, the usually slow and easy combat acquires an interesting edge, and some small touches help it find a little depth. Healing plants are often right in reach during a normal battle and regenerate so you’re never in much danger, but the time it takes them to regenerate in a Challenge Portal would be time wasted waiting, and sometimes getting the best rewards involves throwing yourself into danger to the point you are at risk of dying. However, you can also shoot plants with hearts or ammo types to injure nearby baddies, adding a unique resource consideration to these portals. Refining your play to get the better goodies makes the Challenge Portals a nice window into what the fighting could be like if more thought was put into the main adventure, and while the game probably didn’t want to scare kids away, some incentives to fight smarter or even just a fraction of the difficulty from the portals could benefit the main game. Sadly, even the portals have their issues, such as the indicator that tells you where new enemies spawn sometimes being bugged and appearing in the wrong areas, even the best part of the experience undermined by a lack of thorough testing.

THE VERDICT: The Smurfs 2: The Prisoner of Green Stone starts off as a shooter with a bit of promise, the green crystal destruction and light platforming breaking up encounters with new CrystoBeasts an initially effective enough gameplay loop. However, it runs out of ideas before you’ve even played as your second of four Smurfs, and the interesting design ideas it does still have are cordoned off to the sometimes buggy Challenge Portals. The main adventure ends up becoming a repetitive trudge through meaningless battles with the same foes and same puzzles, a few changes in scenery not doing enough to hide that not much else about the action is changing.

 

And so, I give The Smurfs 2: The Prisoner of Green Stone for Xbox Series X…

A BAD rating. The Challenge Portals having much clearer directions are an appreciated interruption to the monotony of the main quest, but they almost sting more because they show the design team did have ideas on how the SmurfoMix shooting could be complicated and yet didn’t use any of them for the required fights that are all too frequent. It is understandable the game kept some of its tougher stuff optional since the Smurfs would attract a younger audience of players most likely, but the regular action settles into such a plain mold that it feels like almost any good idea for variation was stripped out and shoved into the optional challenges. A few rare moments in the story try something new like needing to outrun rising lava, but they’re so short and simple they can’t make up for the many pointless fights it takes to get to an idea with more substance. If the regular encounters had secondary goals to reward you for fighting more intelligently or forgoing specific options like healing, then you could have fights that are easy on the surface but harder for players looking to get more out of the experience, but considering the lean amount of unique enemies and the repeat fights with Stolas, The Smurfs 2: The Prisoner of Green Stone might be a case of a game that was rushed out without much consideration on the structure of the overall adventure.

 

The Smurfs 2: The Prisoner of Green Stone is a disappointing drop off from the promising design of The Smurfs: Mission Vileaf, the shift to a combat focus not coming with enough interesting ideas to justify it. As said earlier, the section where you play as Storm would have been a fine start if it was only the opening of a game with many more ideas to show after, but Dimwitty, Brainy, and Handy will have to trudge through the same types of challenges as her just in areas that look different. The game does offer co-op play that feels like it could only trivialize the already lacking combat further, The Smurfs 2: The Prisoner of Green Stone becoming stale far too early thanks to shallow shooting mechanics that only ever really show their promise under the intense time pressure of Challenge Portals.