The Adventures of Shuggy Reviews

^{This review was originally posted on http://gamingirl.com which I own}



Be ready to be jumpy and going aaw at the same time. The Adventures of Shuggy is full of ghosts, spiders, goblins and other supposing-to-be-scary stuff. This game is too cute to be scary.

And so the story begins
Shuggy inherits a castle, but he quickly discovers something is wrong – it’s haunted! By spiders on cardboards, goblin ghosts, zombies and much more. The game is simple; you have to collect all the glowing gems from the different rooms to get rid of all the baddies that keeps Shuggy from enjoying his new home.



There’s a great amount of different rooms to enjoy, which gives the player plenty of playtime. Each room has different challenges, and each room has a way of solving it – with a good learning curve, you’ll get through the game via the oldie but goodie: Trial and error. Jump and spin the room then hitting the spikes you didn’t encountered for? No lives, no continues, just a restart of the room, and you’ve learned that this is not how to do the room.

Different rooms have different conditions and circumstances – on top of that Shugggy changes features and powers accordingly. There’s gravity to utilise, doublejump, superjump, magic rope, gravity can be on the side, spinning parts of or the entire room to be able to get all the gems. Most rooms are straightforward and pretty easy to collect, there’s a few challenging ones that really depends on the skills of the hands holding the controller – and this is where my patience and skills is robust. I grew up with Super Mario Bros. 3 in my NES, and I love platformers – the puzzle element in Shuggy makes me stop and think on how to time my movements correct so that I can get through the room, but this happened after couple of deaths – I tend to just go for it.

Something new and refreshing
It does differ from “just a platformer” to a puzzler by the elements in the rooms – ropes, physics and teleporters all are a huge part of solving a level. You have to make use of these to reach all the gems.



Co-op is pretty fun to play with a friend at your side. Here you have both to be survivors, because if one of you die, you’ll fail the challenge and have to restart the room, so it’s all about timing here as well – and cooperation. I particularly remember one level where I was at normal gravity, but my partner (in this case, my fiancé) had a gravity in another direction. None of us could reach the last gem, but if he carried the little block, and I was standing on it, he jumps with me over the edge, and I jump the last part to reach the gem, we could reach it. There’s not as much co-op levels as there is singleplayer levels, and this has it’s good and bad sides – there’s not much playtime with friends, but it’s beatable and you still feel you’ve accomplished something. You’ll get to choose from five different cute characters when playing with a friend.

Shuggy is well animated with some great puzzles, and colorful worlds. Bossfights is fun, and a few rooms can get really challenging – you don’t even have to get all the rooms to get through the game. I had so much fun dodging mines, spiders and spikes that the hours of playtime just past by the speed of light. Yet, the story and gameplay is too simple that I can give the game top score – and small annoying things such as zombie mode also counts in.

GRAMMAR WARNING!
Translated from Danish to English using Google Translate.

I must honestly admit that I had absolutely nothing heard of The Adventures of Shuggy before it popped up on Xbox Live Arcade recently. Thus, there were no expectations to be met, and you might just be pleasantly surprised. It was I, fortunately, also, for The Adventures of Shuggy is an excellent and quite original puzzle platformer from indie company smudged Cat Games, who makes his debut among the big players in the "real" marketplace.

In The Adventures of Shuggy, you control a small creature Shuggy, most of all resembles a little young vampire. Shuggy be around and collect green gems around. 100 tracks in 5 areas; Boiler Room, Dungeon, Gallery, Graveyard and finally Clocktower. When all gems have been assembled in orbit, it is implemented. In the beginning the courses easy and requires most of all a bit timing and it would not really big, but as more and more gameplay elements are introduced, increasing severity also significantly. On some tracks should Shuggy turning the track around to - with gravity's help - to collect the green gem. On other tracks, developers have probably skeleton a bit of classics Braid, for here is a copy of your movements put onto the pitch every time that has passed a certain number of seconds and you come upon "her second, third or fourth (etc. ) I ", it is again. It often takes real good planning already after the first 20 orbits, and from there increases the severity steadily. Once you have hit out how courses should be done, and if you have the timing in order, each track is not long to implement as much of the time is to figure out how to manage the courses.

If you get tired of single player portion, featuring the game on several multiplayer options. Notable among these are the online and local play head-to-head where two players compete to collect as many gems as possible in time. It is filled with all sorts of power-ups, and eventually you can get a power-up so that the control actually becomes somewhat like the Tehkans platform classic Bomb Jack from 1984 - it was a wonderful feeling! Besides the 100 single player tracks, includes The Adventures of Shuggy indeed even about. 40 co-op courses, where 2 players must help each other to collect gems, including knows that one player stepping on a switch, which provides another access to areas with precious stones, etc. Co-op works great but strange way, it is not possible to play co-op online - really weird!

Gameplay generally works well. The controller sits right in the closet, and you quickly learn the game mechanisms. It's actually quite entertaining throughout, although sometimes it may seem frustrating when you die close to the target and must start over on the pitch. The higher the return the joy when it finally clears the track.

The graphics in the game is cute and very arcade-like. The enemies, your own character and everything else consists of bright colors in the selected cartoon style and are quite successful. The music is swing, and it creates an easy and "platform game-like" atmosphere, which fits nicely into the game. All in all, you get the approx. 10 dollars, like The Adventures of Shuggy costs, really great value for money; a long and challenging single player campaign, various versus modes, leaderboards and local co-op - and one might almost ask no more.

8/10

http://www.gamesector.dk/2011/06/22/the-adventures-of-shuggy...

This game is quite the entertaining platformer. With that said, yes it is a platformer, and a pretty awesome one at that. This game involves a purple vampire that goes by the name of Shuggy. Shuggy had inherited a mansion that turns out to be haunted by ghouls, ghosts, spiders, goblins and many other haunted figures. The game has many, many levels and does not get too repetitive surprisingly. Shuggy has to make his way through the Dungeon, Boiler Room, Clocktower, Gallery and Graveyard, each of which have a boss within them just waiting to try and take down Shuggy.

The point of the game is to collect the green gems located within each level (hence why the picture for 'The Adventures of Shuggy', Shuggy is shown holding a green gem).

The game takes quite some time to fully complete (achievement wise) and contains both singleplayer and cooperative game modes.

***NOTE: Servers on the game (for me at least) did not work so in order to fully complete it I had to use two controllers and play through the game with my friend. Luckily the co-op campaign is MUCH shorter than the singleplayer one.

So if you are into platformers or are like me and are always willing to give it a fair shot, then download this game off of the XBLA today!