Revoltin’ Youth Review
Revoltin’ Youth
Developer Open Emotion Studio’s
Platform Sony Mini’s PSP/PS3
Release Date Out Now.
Third time’s a charm as the saying goes and the third outing from Open Emotion is indeed a charming one. A lot more fun thematically than the last title Ninjamurai with its bright vibrant colours, upbeat music and quirky humour all makes this my second favourite game from Open Emotion after the insanely addictive Mad Blocker Alpha.
Revoltin’ Youth marks a definite and rather dramatic change in art direction with the characters sporting a modern-retro look. What’s modern -retro? Well it’s when developers purposely go for an 8 or 16bit look rather than being limited by the technology, similar to what Ubisoft did with the Scott Pilgrim video-game. It just means that the characters look more like video game characters than the smooth hand drawn characters Open Emotion usually create.
That’s not to say the same love and attention to detail hasn’t gone into creating this game, the characters are endearing, the animation is excellent and it still has hand drawn back grounds and lots of special hidden gems for fans of the studio such as posters for their previous games splashed on the walls throughout.
Music has always been a huge factor in their games and Revoltin’ Youth is right up there, this time they licensed in a lot of music from other composers but they have still created some of the tunes in house. The music keep with the retro theme with its funky and catchy tunes all created in Chiptune using various methods such as a gameboy’s soundboard or programs like Pxtone.
As for the gameplay itself, you control three different characters Badger, Cole and Kamiko. Each character has different abilities that must be used to complete the various levels of which there are 50. Kamiko is the fastest of the three, can jump the highest and climb certain walls. Cole is your muscle. He moves very slowly and can’t jump that high but packs one hell of a punch. He is used to clear out enemies and push large moveable objects. Finally, Badger is armed with a spray can that is used to open gates and with him you can collect different coloured spray cans that open different coloured gates. He can also call on his trusty hang glider to cross large expanses.
The puzzles in the game are quite tricky but not illogical, they mainly involve selecting the correct character for the correct task. Flicking switches, pressing buttons, floating on air updrafts, spraying access points and working with different moving platforms make up the majority of the puzzles. The trick is to figure out who needs to do which job and in which order as turning off one switch too early can scupper the other characters chances of doing their part.
The game for a mini is huge, boasting 50 levels but not without some small issues. A few times I found Cole getting stuck in area’s he couldn’t jump out of resulting in the level having to be restarted, and an odd time when my character re-spawned he would die instantly and just re-spawn again. But these are very tiny issues for such a fantastic game.
Overall : A genuinely entertaining title, a lot of thought has gone into creating levels that are both fun and challenging. The music throughout is brilliant and the whole game just looks and plays brilliantly.
This is the third Mini from Open Emotion and they seem to be getting very comfortable with them. We are really looking forward to seeing I Kill Zombies which releases for Halloween and Mad Blocker Adventure on the Vita next year and perhaps the studio will release a multi pack of all three Minis in the near future.
Score 9/10
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