Viewtiful Joe: Red Hot Rumble
Nov 18, 2005
At first glance, Red Hot Rumble seems like a game for hyperactive 13-year-olds hopped up on Twizzlers and Mountain Dew. It's insanely fast-paced arcade fighting crammed with color and motion and power-ups and a thousand collectibles, all bouncing around the screen like so much candy from a pinata. Somewhere in all this activity is your little guy, punching, jumping, collecting, jumping some more, punching, punching, collecting, bouncing... oh wait, that's not your guy, that's the computer's guy, you're over there in the corner, punching, punching, jumping, collecting, collecting. It will leave you breathless and jittery and overwhelmed.
And so it is as first glance. Second, third, and fourth glance, too. It'll be like this for a while. There's a Red Hot Rumble zen you have to acquire before this is anything more than a wildly random smear of colorful chaos.
You'll get some practice getting it ready to play with your friends. Much of the content is locked behind a single-player story in which you have to beat the CPU to get to the levels and characters. This isn't terribly hard to do, but it sometimes seems completely out of your hands whether you win; the computer player seems to randomly alternate between godlike kung fu master and punching bag.
The action is all very in-your-face and multifaceted, with more emphasis on power-ups than the actual fighting. The goal-oriented levels invariably trump the mano-a-mano encounters. And it might not necessarily appeal to fans of the more measured and sometimes majestic Viewtiful Joe.
As far as the basics of gameplay, it's very much like Power Stone or Super Smash Brothers Melee, which are positively sedate in comparison. You choose a character with very simple controls: move, jump, punch, and special punch are pretty much all there is to it. And then you jump into an arena with up to three opponents, as well as a myriad computer controlled bad guys there for the beating.
Each character has a jump, an attack, and then a series of special attacks or moves based on the direction you push the stick when you press a button. The characters are nicely differentiated in terms of movement, attack moves, and abilities. However, when anyone can grab a floating token to pretty much cream everything on the screen, and when these kinds of tokens are regularly bouncing around for the taking, Red Hot Rumble rewards players for being closest to the best power-up instead of for using their characters well.
Unfortunately, this minimizes not only the fighting, but also many of the characters' unique abilities. And since all of the levels are objective-based, beating up the other guys is often just a means to an end. You more often win by collecting tokens, being the guy who kills the boss, or just running around with a flag stuck to your back.
The power ups are supposed to mimic the VFX powers from the Viewtiful Joe games. The most common are a slow motion power-up that dials everyone else's speed way down while letting you move normally, a mach speed power-up that lets you fly around like a comet, and a zoom power-up that turns you into a giant. There are also power ups for invincibility, speed, and extra attack power, as well as gimmicks like gum you can use to stick your opponents in place. There are even little vortexes that will suck everyone into a pocket dimension to play various button-slapping minigames.
It's potentially a good party game, but since the action is so frantic and overbearing, it's also an exhausting party game. And it's not very flexible. There's very little in the way of options for configuring a multiplayer match. You can't, for instance, turn off certain power-ups or choose which objectives you'd like to use on a given level.
For a game that manages to capture the look and personality of Viewtiful Joe, Red Hot Rumble is strangely demanding and uncompromising. As you adjust to what's going on, the hyper zen of it all can come together, but getting there will take patience, practice, and more patience. And that's not exactly an asset for a party game. Maybe in the end, Viewtiful Joe: Red Hot Rumble really is for hyperactive 13-year-olds hopped up on Twizzlers and Mountain Dew.