Joe Danger – Eurogamer Expo-pinion
You have to have respect for Hello Games. It’s made up of four blokes who all had jobs at various reputable developers around the UK, and have a collective CV featuring titles such as Black, Geometry Wars: Galaxies, Black, Burnout, Black, Virtua Tennis 3 and Black. Just in case you missed it, I bloody loved Black, it’s one of my favourite floating gun games.
They gave that all up for a dream. A dream of a bloke on a motorbike going from left to right.
A dream called Joe Danger.
Joe Danger’s roots can be traced back to games like Excitebike, Motocross maniacs, and more recently Trials and Little Big Planet. It’s a very colourful, fast paced stunt ’em up on wheels.
No one element of playing Joe Danger is particularly complicated. The left stick is used to control pitch in the air, and is used for performing wheelies on the ground. Right trigger is go, left is stop, press either left or right button to perform a trick in the air, A to turbo, and hold X to duck, and release for a bunny hop.
Each of these on their own is easily manageable, but to get those high high scores, you’ll need to be on top of all of them at once. There is a combo scoring system, where chaining together everything with a wheelie gets you shedloads of points.
You get a bunch of points for performing a spin in the air, but if you land on your head, you’ll break your combo, go back to the last checkpoint, and loose all the points from the chain.It’s fairly easy to keep long wheelies going, but you can fall off if you aren’t careful. There are three tiers of tricks, press the trick button once to get a simple trick, worth a few points, press it twice for a medium trick, for some more, and three times for a hard trick, worth loads of points. Turbo is charged up by getting air and doing tricks, and the bunny hop move is useful for getting past obstacles, and getting additional air.
All these gameplay ideas fit together very nicely, to create a game that isn’t quite like anything else, but is a lot of fun. There is definitely going to be a big focus on high score challenges, and it will support leaderboards. You have to ballance your attention between looking at the track, and not messing up as you try to get from A to B, and making Joe do things to get him points. It’s not too difficult, but you will be retrying fairly often as you know you can do better.
The level editor, whilst not as full featured (at present) as the Little Big Planet level editor, it seems exactly like the kind of thing that people far more creative than me will be able to use to come up with some excellent levels. I just hope that Hello Games put together an infrastructure for easily sharing levels.
Like many of the games in the Indie Games Arcade, I put the controller down to let someone else have a go, not because I was bored. It was probably my 3nd favourite game of the Expo.
Nice little write up on this game. I managed to play this little game in the indie game lounge of Eurogamer on Saturday and it was the only game i played there! Looks like some serious fun and while standing there watching others play and having one of the team explain various things to me i couldn’t help but feel hopeful that this game will be great! It’s like Trials HD with less of the torture and more of the fun!
Black was awful 😛 This game sounds like a lot of fun, and I can’t argue with their other game credentials.
Lies! It was wonderful. Incredibly cinematic, tense explodey first person shooter.