Scott Pilgrim vs The World was recently released on Xbox Live to help coincide with the recently released movie. The game adaptation is in the style of an old school, side scrolling beat em up. While it was kind of cool to play a game in this style again, unfortunately, the overall execution of the game was not very well done. For those who are unfamiliar with Scott Pilgrim there is a girl that he likes, however, before they can be together he needs to defeat her seven evil ex-boyfriends. One of them even has super natural powers. Your world map is reminiscent of those older style games where you start at level one and then once you have completed that you move your character on the world map to level two and so on.
The game play in these levels can be a bit frustrating. You have your basic punches and kicks and then as you level up you will learn some more powerful moves. Enemies in this game can also be a major source of annoyance. There is this one group of enemies that you will run into in the second level where if they take a picture of you, it stuns you. What tends to happen is that you will have two or three enemies taking pictures of you while other ones are beating you up. You are effectively helpless in these situations and your HP goes down really fast. The checkpoint system in this game is also really bad. If you happen to run out of lives at the end of the level then you get sent all the way back to the beginning to go through it all over again. As you progress through levels you pass through different ideas which would be ideal places for you to respawn if you get taken out. Sadly, the developers didn’t’ do that which will cause you a great deal of frustration. As I was playing through Scott Pilgrim the game locked up my Xbox360 on multiple occasion for no reason at all. I could be at the end of the level and still have all of my lives but if the game locked up on me then I was sent all the way back to the beginning. It was very frustrating and there were times where, if I wasn’t writing this review, I probably would have just stopped playing the game altogether. I should mention that I was playing single player because Scott Pilgrim vs the World does not feature online co op. It does have local co op and the game is a lot more fun when you go through it with a friend. It’s baffling to me why they couldn’t put in online co op and let me go through the game with my friends from around the country. At the very least it would have extended the replayability of this title.
When you first begin the game you get to choose whether you want to be Scott Pilgrim, Ramona, Stills or Kim. Each character has their own ending so those who are a big fan of the Scott Pilgrim franchise will probably get some extra replayability out of this title to see all of those extra endings. If you weren’t a fan of the franchise beforehand then this won’t convert you. This game could have been a lot more fun if a couple of tweaks were made in certain key areas. Maybe the developer plans to issue a patch in the future to correct all of these issues. The question is though, will it be too little too late? As always with Xbox Live Arcade titles there is a demo to download so be sure to check it out for yourself.
Score 6/10
