Customer Reviews

Scooby-Doo! Night of 100 Frights

5 star:		(1)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

Especially for a huge Scooby Doo fan, like myself, this game is a lot of fun. The graphics are excellent. The environments are huge and varied. There are numerous references to various Scooby Doo episodes, including a large number of "villains". Scooby Doo can perform characteristic actions and does characteristic things to defeat and evade villains. It really feels like you're "playing the cartoon" (albeit as 3D computer graphics).

However, there is one flaw that keeps the game from being a 5 across the board--there are quite a few sections that are incredibly difficult--too difficult in my view. Difficult enough that you'll throw your controller across the room, curse at the machine, and have to repeat a section a good 30 or 40 times if you want to pass it. Of course, we don't want games that are too easy and that we can complete in a few hours. But we also do not want games that result in hours of frustration repeating the same section over and over and over with little apparent advancement in our ability to get through it--many people simply give up on this game at various points. It's arguable whether this title is aimed more at kids or older nostalgia hounds like myself (I'm middle-aged), but certainly kids will be attracted to it, and later sections of the game will be just too darned hard and frustrating for them. More than likely, parents or older siblings will have to try to complete many of these sections for children.

The game is basically a third-person platformer. The environments are often 2D, but they tend to be very cleverly "disguised" to always seem 3D, with various barriers and changes in whether you can move Scooby left and right or upscreen and downscreen. The objective is to work your way through various levels and sublevels (I believe there are at least 80 sublevels), collecting Scooby Snacks, defeating constant "monsters" (who usually engage in simple repetitive platformer actions), collecting "clues", and finding and rescuing the rest of the Mystery Inc. gang. There are also the requisite boss fights, which are more challenging, but remarkably, no boss fight, except for the last, is as challenging as some "normal" sublevels.

There are three main environments--a big, spooky mansion (which looks just like the one on the title sequence of the original series), leading eventually to secret dungeons and laboratories; a set of seaside docks, small villages, businesses, shipwrecks and such; and an extensive hedge maze which eventually leads to a series of cemeteries, crypts, and so on.

Scooby can walk, run, jump and swing from suspended objects, like chandeliers. As you play the game, you gain more abilities, such as double-jumping, two funny "stealth" modes, two different kinds of "smashing" abilities, items that will make walking on tricky surfaces easier, an umbrella to enable limited "floating", and additional "weapons" in the way of bubble gum and soap bubbles.

As with any good platformer, the challenges arise with figuring out the patterns of environments and enemies as well as figuring out just how to use your abilities to navigate and defeat them. Although even the beginning levels are challenging at first, they are achievable once you get used to the controls.

The problem with some later levels is a combination of the environments being overly complex and you having to perform very specific actions with very precise timing and positioning--jumps, smashes and such can be nearly impossible unless you have Scooby facing an exact way, in an exact spot, and push a specific sequence of buttons at exactly the right time. As if that weren't difficult enough, there seems to be something of a randomizing factor in whether you'll be successful on particular tries. Sometimes the exact same controller manipulations by you will work, sometimes not. There are at least six or seven "sublevels" that you'll find yourself having to perform at least twenty times to get through, and occasionally, you have to perform very long sequences of difficult actions successfully or start over from scratch, at the beginning of that sublevel. Making it worse, you often have to go through four sublevels until you can save again. If you make it though three difficult sublevels and have to stop playing and turn the machine off, you're out of luck--you have to do it all again later. Even most early sublevels will require at least three or four tries to get through, but three or four is acceptable (fun, even) and what we expect.

Making the game a bit more challenging (although in a pleasant way) is the fact that you'll have to revisit all sublevels at least once (especially if you want to collect all Scooby Snacks and such), because there are things that are impossible to do, and rooms/sublevels that are impossible to get to, until you attain later "power-ups". Another flaw, perhaps, is that sometimes it's not clear what you need to do. There are puzzles to be solved and items to be attained that are less than obvious, and you can spend a lot of time walking back through sublevels (you can always access all of the sublevels that you've played already) aimlessly as you try to figure out what you're supposed to do next--the entire game is something like a maze, or one huge puzzle. I had to use a walkthrough on the Internet to complete the game. I'd suspect that most people will need to do this. It might be a good idea in future games like this to include a "task list", which at least gives the player the next (and past) puzzles to be solved or items that can be attained.

But even with these flaws, for a Scooby Doo fan, this is an incredibly enjoyable, addictive game (at least when you're not screaming obscenities at your PlayStation and the game creators during the difficult parts). You'll want to play it again just to experience the environments. But if you're thinking about buying it for a young gamer (under 10 or 11, say) who is not particularly a Scooby fan you should probably think again, as I can almost guarantee that the game will be abandoned, unfinished, in frustration.

I bought the game for my sons 9,8 and 6.They got hours of fun and enjoyment,while no levels were too hard they were challenging enough.