| Amazing Island review |
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Amazing Island is Sega's attempt at combining the conventions of Pokemon, Hyper Sports and Magical Pengel to create something greater than the sum of its parts, but in practice it is a shallow affair that fails to excel in any one of those areas. Players initially take control of a randomly generated monster and take it into battle in a series of Track & Field style sports events. These events range from the traditional (100m sprint) to the downright bizarre (carving a giant statue in bullet time) and success in them unlocks new tools with which to better create and customise your own monsters. Unlocking these tools is the key to getting the most out of the game as the freedom you are eventually given allows you to design complex monsters that are limited only by your imagination. Early on players are given a pen with which to draw the outline of the monster’s individual body parts. The game then inflates the sketch into 3D and does an impressive job of transforming the doodle into a fully working polygon model. Like a virtual Penny Crayon, it literally brings your sketches to life.
The problem with this is that it all feels too much like a 3D version of Microsoft Paint rather than an interesting spin on the athletics game genre. The events themselves are weak and uninteresting, either far too easy or far too frustrating to be any fun. The first two events, for example, consist of a sprint that can be won without even breaking into a sweat (real or otherwise) followed by a strange variation of “ducks and drakes” that requires almost impossible levels of timing. Sega have taken the notion of the difficulty curve and thrown it straight into the bin; your heart will follow as you’ll love creating new monsters but you’ll hate the events needed to unlock new parts. As such, these events become a necessary chore to earn those monster creation tools but once you have given life to an ultimate monster there is nowhere to take your pet. The various types of monster have little difference in their athletics skills meaning that after you have initially conquered the sporting events there is little reason to return to them.
Amazing Island feels broken, as though a key element is missing. Sega needed to tighten up the main game to work well with the custom monsters but decided instead to throw in a few clumsy extras that do nothing to improve the overall experience. Plug in a GBA and you can download photographs of your monster in playing-card form and engage in a tactical card game. The photographs taken on the GameCube are reproduced surprisingly faithfully on the GBA screen and the card game is a fun diversion from the main event. The requirement of a GBA or two however, makes this an expensive mini game that in reality only seems like fun because it is just a little bit better than the main game. A four-player competition mode is also thrown into the mess but again proves to be a pointless exercise. The competitions never reach the frenzied heights of superior arcade sports games and the ability to trade and battle friends’ monsters is nowhere near as fun as Nintendo’s genre defining monster hit.
Although this website would never champion graphics and sound at the expense of gameplay and atmosphere it would be nice if Sega had put some effort into the presentation. The gameplay, after-all, is terrible so it may have been a little compensation if the game looked pretty. Sadly the visuals feel unimaginative and the audio track sounds like the work of a composer who is happy to put in only the bare minimum of effort. Even the menus are sloppily executed; setting up a four-player battle can take forever as can something simple like saving your progress. Want to save? Are you sure? Are you really sure? Talk about holding the player by the hand.
Finishing Amazing Island will leave most players disappointed, which is a real shame. The character creation and customisation kit provides an admirable freedom of choice and is one of the best seen in any title, yet it is hung around a hollow shell of a game that renders monster creation completely pointless. Sega should hang onto these tools; if they were used appropriately they would no doubt turn a good game into great one. Olympic sports games should transpose the exertion of the event into the physical world of the player whilst monster games should give people a reason to want to create and trade until they have the best monsters. Amazing Island does neither of these and an interesting customisation tool cannot change that.
This game is ultimately disappointing though, because it comes from a developer with the highest of pedigrees. Amazing Island feels like the product of a completely different publisher; the sort of output you would expect from a desperate company, eager to cash in on current gaming trends. For now, Amazing Island remains a failed experiment, it shows promise for future titles but this game will never be worth buying or even playing. |
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System: Nintendo GameCube
Genre: Sport
Developer: Sega Wow
Publisher: Sega
Players: 1-4
Version: United States
Writer: Ashley Day
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Pros:
- Extensive monster creation kit
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Cons:
- Steep difficulty curve
- Uninteresting events
- Pointless extras
- Poor presentation
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