When Bubsy 4D got announced by Atari it got everyone by surprise. I personally played Bubsy 3D and completed it almost 25 years ago and I knew that the quality of this game was basically a death sentence to the franchise.
But Bubsy is a paradoxical Bobcat. Despite having mediocre to bad quality games it always had fans. Bubsy has a weird charm, that’s undeniable.
The new game is a good sequel. Bubsy became older. We became older. Humor became older and developers hit the right spot. They researched the topic well. They didn’t try to be serious instead they laugh at Bubsy and the franchise. In a good way. And this is the right approach.
Hopefully, they won’t miss the wave they created and continue working on the future Bubsy games.
Story
The new enemies – BaaBots, empowered by technologies of Bubsy’s former enemies Woolies stole the Golden Fleece. Bubsy with his friends in response hijack a BaaBots’ spacecraft and commit the new adventure to return back the Golden Fleece.
Woolies are still Bubsy’s enemies but player will encounter them enslaved. At one location they will even be forced to participate in pit fights to gain at least some freedom in their handless lives (they literally have no hands as a species). Player can even talk to some of them.
Platforming and abilities
Bobcats don’t soar in real life even if they do pretty long jumps. But Bubsy is able to soar. Same as he was able to do it in Bubsy 3D. He is able as well to double jump and use his claws to cling to the walls.
In addition Bubsy got a completely new ability – he can now inflate into a ball. It’s not clear was it implemented to satisfy certain inflation fetishes but it allowed the game designers to introduce Sonic style pipe sections and longer high speed tracks.
You can even get a “Hedgehog skin” in which Bubsy is basically naked (with censorship of his private parts, even if he never wore pants anyway). Same as Sonic.
You will need to jump a lot but thankfully game really tries to give you as many chances as possible to not to fall because there are a lot of climbing and a lot of jumping. Like, really a lot. And it doesn’t feel bad. Developers did a really good job making the controls feel smooth and responsive and less frustrating.
In Bubsy 3D the bobcat has been shooting atoms for his own reasons. In Bubsy 4D he got an ability to use claws against enemies instead of atoms. We all know that normal cats don’t shoot enormously big atoms, right? This finally got fixed.
Claws jump as well allows Bubsy to do forward jumps midair.
In addition you have now a store with abilities. One problem with this store is – this abilities are mostly useless and doesn’t effect your ability to complete the game in any sense.
The good
When you start the game it catches you by a warm feeling of nostalgia. Or at least a home you would like to be. To enjoy easy life. To have friends.
One of the side characters is filming Bubsy with a camcoder. We get all the characters introduced. Meanwhile something is happening in the background: Woolies commit their new evil plan and epically fail and get enslaved. We all know that the new adventure should start somewhere.
Humor is the best part of the game.
I dislike cozy games in general but Bubsy 4D became an exclusion from this rule. Because of humor.
Jokes are funny. Some of them are on the edge of being too adult and if you get them – you get them. If not, well, sometimes it’s better not to know. In the end it’s not a Conker’s bad fur day.
Design of the worlds is weird and that’s also a good part. It’s obscure, it’s funny, it invests into platformer mechanics instead of making sense, but it could be better. Most of the time it feels too generic.
Visually levels look like randomly stuck together assets with a lot of repeating elements. Sometimes levels actually look epic cause of enormous structures and ideas behind them. Sometimes they look lazy. Half on half.
Levels provide you with simple challenges. I’m a hardcore player so I didn’t feel any difficulty behind them. Until maybe the last levels.
But platforming still provides a variety of situations. It doesn’t feel boring in the final mix: there is always something new being introduced.
The bad
I’ll go from bigger problems to smaller ones. Bubsy 4D for sure has problems.
And the biggest one – game has only 15 levels. Yep, you can beat this platformer in 5 hours including exploring. If you remove exploring part then even faster. If you will decide to get all the achievements then probably it will take twice more time but still this game feels tiny. For 20 euros it even feels unfair.
Second would be glitches. At least once I was able to make a trap to punch me through the wall into a room without an exit. Without an ability to die you can only restart the whole level.
Sometimes you just fall through textures, lose a life and go back to the ground. Annoying but okay. But sometimes you enter a death loop with a bad spawning point that just kills you until you run out of lives. Bubsy 4D feels overall polished but not polished enough.
Such problems don’t happen often but they happen.
Difficulty. I usually play on hard and extreme difficulties so Bubsy 4D without difficulty selection is a very easy game for me. It has interesting challenges but nothing difficult.
I understand that probably game is targeted at a younger audience but let’s be real – kids have Fortnight. People who play Bubsy are older people. Kids mostly don’t even know who is it.
What’s especially strange – humor over here sometimes leans too much towards being adult. Even Bubsy jokes that the game should be more family friendly when the humor becomes too mature. But difficulty for some reason feels like it was made for complete new players.
Very few types of enemies. It’s a shame because fighting enemies here is fun. Bubsy 4D has very well made controls that save you from a lot of midair mistakes and missed platforms, but also allow you to fight well. Despite this the game process leans heavily towards pure platforming with occasional enemies.
And the last minor problem – camera. Camera always has been a thing to mess up with platformers. It gets stuck in objects and sometimes produces flashing frames because of positioning but could be much worse. Been there. Here it’s alright most of the time. I’m thankful at least for that.
Verdict
Can I recommend Bubsy 4D? Yes, definitely. But not for the full price. 20 euros for it is steep. Especially considering the length of the game. I have a feeling developers were afraid that people will get bored if they make it longer. Many Steam reviews point out at the length of the game so I’m not alone.
Or developers simply didn’t have money for more content.
I really want a DLC now. Or next game in the franchise – Bubsy 5D. Will be very glad to play it.