Muppet Monster Adventure

for Sony Playstation

Distributed by
Sony

Well, that's the plot out of the way. Essentially, all those who enjoyed Croc or Mario 64 will be in familiar territory here as you progress by opening caskets or bumping off monsters either with your laser gun or by spinning round like the Tazmanian devil. Your reward are stars of different colours and the more, the merrier, points-wise.

Muppet Monster Adventure is set over 18 free-roaming levels such as Peacock Purgatory, Hallways of Doom, Poker Faces and Nosferatu Bites Back, with six Muppet bosses to encounter and five magical morphing abilities, each activated by collecting a quartet of their respective amulets. These include a "Wearbear", which allows you to sprout huge hairy arms and legs in order to climb vines in certain areas, "Nosferatu" - giving you wings to glide about - and "Muck Monster", providing you underwater swimming ability.

Other things worthy of note in this wacky world are the need to collect the five letters that spell "BONUS" for more benefits, flying hearts for extra lives, secret passages to be found, the need to escape from the evil gardener who wants to chop you up with his shears and you can get advice from a number of orange-haired goons who tell you to do specific actions that will help you, but they don't always tell you how to complete the said actions and some aren't as intuitive as others.

The graphics are brilliantly-realised and all the colours of the rainbow are on display as you go walkabout. The scenery rotates in relation to your position onscreen with, but the camera position over you is just above and behind, so if you turn too quickly and head back in the same direction its effective placement will be directly above and the view will be restricted until you've moved on a bit as the camera pans up to reveal the path taken. Alternatively, stand still for a moment and your viewpoint will be centred to your destination.

While being a very entertaining experience, it suffers from being way too easy. Then again, it's no doubt aimed at children for whom the difficulty level will be set just about right and for those who don't realise it's just Croc with different characters.

Overall: 3/5

This review was on Freeloader.com before they closed.

Review copyright © Dominic Robinson, 2000.