As soon as I saw this game come through my letterbox I thought “oh dear its going to be a bad one this time”, but I was in for a shock. It’s a monstrosity. The graphics look like they’ve come from a rejected Sega Megadrive, whilst the audio and music appears to have been composed by a deaf person inside a shed.
George of the Jungle, for many kids, is the real-world Tarzan and the 1997 film starring Brendan Fraser in many ways was a huge success. However, the success was behind the stupidity - the producers thought that making a cheap accessible film was hugely beneficial for their wallets so all they needed was a stupid audience and a nice title for the movie, and as a result George of the Jungle was made with the majority of the audience being kids.
putting a nice title in front of a terrible film is a formula that works well. In many ways, the cartoon version on cartoon network was the same old story, and now we are presented with a video game version on the PS2, Nintendo D.S, and the Wii – so your children can pretend they can swing from tree to tree and break your front window.
This game reminds me of the market genius that is Slush Puppy - which is where urinal cakes go to die. Somewhere a thought sprung up “Well yes it is slush but if we put a nice word after the nasty word I think people will buy it - puppies are nice, people are stupid, lets give it a try”, and children have been buying it ever since. George of the Jungle follows the exact principal and got the exact outcome.
All the levels in George of the Jungle follow the same boring structure - you start off by making your way through a linear path collecting coins and defeating various enemies on your way. At the end of each stage you are forced to engage in a boss fight, these battles are quite easily the most infuriating and crude feature of the game. Bosses require you to observe their attack pattern and style of fighting as with many games. However, the bosses are insanely difficult and for a supposed kid’s game, this is quite worrying. An example being the first boss in the game; we are staged up against the ‘Chief’ monkey of the jungle. Mr. Chief is armed with a pair of insultingly large red boxing gloves whereas George is armed with nothing but his skinny little mitts and his hairdo. I don’t know if it’s just me but if I was a child playing this I would not only feel that the odds were against me but also as if the game producers were deliberately making it impossible to complete the game just to frustrate the younger generation. It doesn’t help either that your health bar is measured in a bunch of bananas, containing only 5 at the beginning of the game. Taking into account how much damage your going to take throughout the adventure this also becomes tiresome and annoying.
The technical sides of things are even worse. I frequently encountered lock-ups while playing, which caused even greater agony. Occasionally it was unclear if it was a glitch that had been encountered, but many times I would see George drop dead before my eyes in a fight regardless if the enemy was attacking him or not which admittedly made me laugh for about 2 minutes and then kick my bedroom wall in the next 4. Lip sync was definitely not on the designer’s agenda - I haven’t seen mouths flap like that since the arrival of The Flintstones. That being said it certainly makes for mild amusement. The character models are disgustingly animated to the point of almost being quite literally scary; Ursula in particular looks like she has been stuck in a torture chamber full of cosmetics then had C4 set upon her creating the poor excuse for her face.
Overall, the gameplay is horrendous, the graphics are Tetris quality, and the lasting appeal is suicide. Everything is basically not what you would call a gaming phenomenon. What makes me so angry however is not the actual game but the developers, they didn’t create this game for gaming itself but just for the money - how can the HMV man not feel guilty selling this to kids who have been saving up for 2 and a half years? This disappointingly means in twenty odd years no one will remember it and that’s a shame. As a result a giant leap backwards for mankind and its achievements.
2/10
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