You're in for a
devil of a time
Many many moons ago back in the late 90s, I remember being exceptionally excited when my birthday hit, and my parents presented me with the gift of a Playstation 1. For me, there was always this unbridled joy that came with being gifted a new system...one that was only matched by knowing that I could afford the newest one myself. But of course, my parents being who they are(despite my dad disliking video games) they also got me a couple of games to go with it (Final Fantasy 9 and Spyro the Dragon) as well as the demo disk that introduced my love for even more of the games which I would later play in the future (including the Gex trilogy, which I'll be discussing in another review).
The game Jersey Devil, was unfortunately not one of the games on the demo. It was, however, one of the first games that I saw in the game store that piqued my interest (the first were actually Chrono Cross and Crash Bandicoot). After having just played Spyro a bit and absolutely loving the gameplay, the idea intrigued me: you play as a purple devil super hero that basically goes around fighting crime and foiling the bad guys.
It took me almost 18-19 years, but I finally finished that beast of a game...and I'm content. You know those games that you invest yourself quite a bit in even if they're somewhat short, and you just feel that tinge of relief when you finally close the book on that story? That's about how I feel with this one. It was a long process filled with losing my PS1 due to its easily breakable CD drive, obtaining a new one, having the same happen, turning to emulation, getting distracted by other games, turning back to emulation, and finally finishing it.
And now, after that long introduction, I'd like to start talking about what makes this game tick...what makes it interesting and unique. What works? What didn't work? Would this game do well if it was remade today? Or is it a game that wouldn't stand the test of time even with a fresh coat of paint?
Well, the first thing to talk about in a game is its story. As I mentioned, in this game you play the nameless purple devil protagonist simply known as the Jersey Devil. As a baby, you're found by a strange pumpkin-headed (literal pumpkin-headed) lispy guy known as Dennis. He takes you to the workshop of his master, the evil Dr. Knarf (pronounced with a silent K, like the sound Pinky makes in Pinky and the Brain). The doctor takes an interest in you and decides to dissect you, but his knife was destroyed after Dennis interrupted the doctor with his discovery. So Dr. Knarf goes to get some new tools, only to come back to you destroying his lab, witnessing you holding a bottle of nitroglycerin in your hand and dropping it, ejecting yourself from the lab. Years later, crime is rampant in Jersey City with random vegetable creatures causing havoc. Jersey Devil has become a full fledged super hero with a cape, and has took it upon themselves to stop crime in its tracks and stop Dr. Knarf for good.
Cut and dry, the plot is very basic. Bad guy wreaks havoc, good guy sets out to stop them. Admittedly, the story isn't the game's strong suit outside of the amusing opening cutscene. I absolutely love that they named the Dr. Knarf, and him and Dennis remind me of a unique type of Pinky and Brain dynamic; Dennis is very slow but has some charm to him, and Knarf is clearly an overly ambitious and over-the-top evil person that you know would rule the world if he could. They even kind of sound like Pinky and the Brain when they talk, so I'm really wondering if there was some inspiration from that in there.
But what really interests me is the gameplay of this game. At its most basic, the game looks as if it only has a handful of levels: The museum, chemical wasteland, park, crypt, and shipyard. But you'll learn very early on that each area has actually 2 levels, 3 if you count the secret bonus levels found in each area. So if you visit an area like the museum for the first time, you'll be gathering letters that will let you into the first area, while the 2nd time may have you doing different things or even taking a different route entirely to access the 2nd area.
navigating your way through the game itself is pretty straightforward. You can jump, duck, punch, do a tail spin when you hit punch button during a jump, and glide. Most of the game is basically "get from point A to point B, and collect pieces of a key to progress." How this happens varies somewhat in both challenge as well as type. You may have to attack multiple enemies to get the pieces of key (in this game's case, it's letters spelling out KNARF...I swear this guy is obsessed with himself), avoid getting crushed by boulders, or survive a slide to the bottom. All and all, the controls and navigation are pretty simple.
The only gripe in this department, much like basically 95% of games released in this time is the camera. With games such as this, Spyro, Gex, Mario, Zelda, etc... the camera mixes between being free-movement to you moving it manually with the back triggers. In most games, however, you get to choose just how manual or automatic you want it to be. You are basically tailoring just how painful you want the experience to be, with semi-automatic usually being the best choice, and automatic normally being the worst.
With Jersey Devil, you only get the one choice of VERY semi-automatic...and at many points with its closed areas (such as the cavern level in the Park area), it can be a huge problem. I'd probably lose count of how many times I've died because the camera focused on a wall and had problems refocusing, or when it suddenly span around out of nowhere and I didn't see the hole my character fell into at the time.
I also did have a minor gripe with the jumping mechanic. On its own, it functions pretty normally: you press a button to jump, and when you're on a trampoline-like object, you press jump to make you go a bit higher. But there's also the somewhat confusing and mildly annoying auto-jump whenever you reach the edge of something. When you're going between a break in the path, it's perfectly fine as there's plenty of space to work with. However, when you're trying to balance on the head of a turtle or going from small tree branch to small tree branch, that auto-jump will almost always lead to certain death. Oh, you weren't far enough on the turtle's head to be able to hit that barrel? Just move slightly more and watch your character jump like you're trying to hop across, and flail like crazy to course correct as your character inevitably falls into the water and drowns.
There was also the fact that if you auto-jumped from a ledge, you could easily glide (which was handy in one of the secret levels). But god forbid you forget about auto-jump and instinctively press jump on the ledge and attempt to go into a glide, because the game won't let you. Sure, you can still jump while auto-jumping (which actually does nothing), but you absolutely can't glide. So unless you jump just before the ledge or remember the auto-jump mechanic exists, you'll just have to say hello to the pit below.
Off that note, I will say that I do applaud Jersey Devil's approach to difficulty. In the first levels of the first 2 areas, the levels themselves are pretty simple and straightforward. However, with each level there is an obvious increase in difficulty, naturally with the final areas and levels being some of the most difficult.
That being said, while I appreciate the game's gradual increase of difficulty, I really don't care for how it achieves that.
Even when this game first came out, the difficulty of it was never in the enemies themselves or various traps. Don't get me wrong: the enemies themselves could be frustrating at points down the road, but only because they guarded so often that you basically had to wait for them to hit you before you could do any damage. Likewise, traps could be a nuisance from time to time as well, but only because they led to the game's most frustrating way of dying: Falling.
Yes, falling. Land in water? You fall and drown. Everywhere you go, there are ledges, holes in the floor, and many, MANY different ways that your character could fall. Traps could knock you into a hole, enemies or bosses could hit you mid jump or glide and cause you to fall, or you could miss a ledge by just a bit and slowly descend to your death. Didn't duck under or jump on top of a pipe as you're riding across? Prepare to fall in the water and drown or fall to the ground and die. It's almost as if the creators had a fetish for characters falling to their death, because outside of the main areas...levels were almost always surrounded by potential fall-death hazards. Just touching an enemy would knock you back and could potentially knock you down one of those hazards (hell, a couple will actually rush at you for just this). I was never the biggest fan of fall deaths...but even Spyro didn't have them to this almost absurd degree (I mean, Spyro had them...but the levels were open enough and gave enough powerups so they were never an issue).
Many levels had this kind very linear-or-you-die path.
No, really.
I'm serious.
Really, I'm not kidding.
EVERYWHERE.
EVERY. WHERE.
And I'll be completely honest, I used an invincibility cheat during my most recent playthrough. Not because the enemies or bosses are tough...oh no. Bosses even without any cheats enabled are almost laughably simple...with the worst being, as I mentioned earlier, a blocking machine that you had to time just right. No, the cheat itself was because, as I mentioned, when an enemy hits you it knocks you a small amount back. And most of the time, this happens to be near a fall hazard, which as I mentioned is instant death. And given the fact that you have a set amount of lives...this can be a very shortly played game if you don't time everything well enough (though thankfully the game is VERY merciful in letting you save every time you get past one of the "areas" in a level (meaning every time the game has to load into a new part of the level). There ARE also continue points as well, but it's still just a nuisance that I wish didn't exist.
Now, outside of those gripes, I'd also like to mention that this game is basically a collectathon. In each level and secret level, there are a set number of nitro boxes as well as a set of 2 hostages (32 in total). Now...unlike games such as, say, Spyro, there is no real reward for collecting everything (aside from maybe the last cutscene in JD, I'm not sure). Whenever you finish a level, you're given a medallion of sorts that will help you in the final level. If you just rush through the level, the medallion is red. If you rush through and get all the nitro boxes, you see JD blow up the end area with a nitro bottle, and your medallion is a teal color. If you rush through and just save the hostages, it's purple (I believe). If you take the time and do both objectives, you get a gold medallion.
Granted, you are given a sort of reward in "Power Points" when you collect all the nitro boxes in a level. And each secret level can only be accessed by having a set number of Power Points.
Speaking of Secret Levels, this is one part of the game that's pretty...eh. All of the secret levels are basically a giant slide that's themed based on the area it's in. Your only job is to slide down collecting pumpkins (this game's version of mario coins) and devil tails (extra lives). At the end of each are 2 hostages, and your only real challenges are getting the switches (for 2 of the levels) and avoiding obstacles/TNT boxes. It was kind of a neat idea for maybe the first 2 levels, but I was really hoping for a bit more variety outside of the obstacle type and look.
The levels themselves outside of the before mentioned obvious fall-fetish are pretty neat for the most part. The look of them is pretty alright, nothing spectacular or horrible, but the idea of them is a little fun.
The bosses themselves for each level ranged from neat, to odd, to bleh. Fighting a sumo-bear creature and spray can with wheels and a cape was very amusing to say the least and they did fit with the game's slightly whimsical undertone...but fighting a giant bat at the end of the Crypt level as opposed to the end of the Caverns level (where bats were the main enemy) was confusing to me, and admittedly fighting said sumo-bear really made no sense in retrospect rather than...say, fighting a large sumo-cabbage creature or some other odd concoction that the game was going for.
Graphics wise, for the time the game came out it was pretty okay...roughly on a similar level as Spyro or Crash. Playing it again, I was very confused at a choice they made early on in the game: The opening scene is done in the style of cartoon, which I actually really liked as I enjoy cutscenes like that. However, it's literally the only scene in this game using that style...everything else uses the in-game graphics, including the ending cutscenes (both after the last battle as well as the actual ending cutscene). It actually made me wonder why that scene was even included in the first place, if just to draw people into a game that they may end up being disappointed in if it wasn't included.
I actually somewhat enjoyed the soundtrack to the game as well as the choices in sound. The soundtrack had a bit of that whimsical cartoon vibe in some areas, and just overall the songs fit the areas being visited. For what little voice acting there was (mainly from Knarf and Dennis), it was actually pretty decent. However, once again I was baffled as to why it was needed outside of the opening and ending cutscenes. With as little as there was, the game could have functioned completely fine without it. But no, on random occasion when you enter an area, it'll cut to Dr. Knarf in bland-background area either laughing or making some sort of comment. There's no reason for those bits to be in there, they just are.
Overall, the game has its goods, and its bads. Despite the flaws that it does have, it's still an enjoyable game. Would it do well today? Sure, I think if remade correctly, it could do fine. Take out the random Knarf-talking bits when you enter an area, fix the jumping mechanic, ease up maybe just a bit on the falling hazards (seriously, they're practically everywhere), and I think the game could do okay in this day and age. With its dents and cracks, I still found it to be enjoyable on a smaller level than I did Spyro, even if I had to resort to cheats so that I wasn't being pushed into the water or down a hole in the floor every five seconds.
Admittedly, it's not a game that I'd recommend in its current state for those reasons. It has its fun moments, but the mounting frustration from the amount of ways to fall and lose a life would probably frustrate players a bit. However, with a bit of polish (and hell, I'll be honest that this game would be an absolute gem with a Spyro/crash type of graphical remake), I think this is a game that people would greatly enjoy.
I think a remade version could look pretty cool, especially if they went full-superhero cartoon style.
