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| Scott Pilgrim, Ramona Flowers, Kim Pine, and Stephen Stills, fighting one of Ramona's Evil Exes and two thugs. |
Scott Pilgrim, his girlfriend Ramona Flowers, and his friends Stephen Stills and Kim Pine must defeat Ramona’s seven Evil-Exes so that he may date Ramona. That is the entire story.
Scott Pilgrim is seven levels long, each focused on a different Evil-Ex. Up to four players, controlling the four main characters, travel from left to right, beating up enemies until they reach the Ex at the end, who serves as that level’s boss. The game starts on an over world map, and levels are divided up into two section so players can go back and fight through specific parts of the level.
Characters have a light attack, a heavy attack, a jump and a block. Pressing the attack buttons and the control stick in certain directions will make the characters use stronger attacks.
Characters also have a health meter and a guts meter. Each character has two special stronger attacks, activated by the shoulder buttons, which use up the guts meter; also each character has an certain amount of strength (how strong attacks are), willpower (how large their guts meter is), defense, and speed.
The guts meter acts as another extra life. If you die and there is still some of the guts bar left, it brings you back to life.
Defeating opponents gets the character experience points. Any character that gets enough experience points levels up, which is supposed to increase their stats, but it never did in any noticeable way. Leveling up also unlocks new combo attacks for the player to use, which are unique for each character.
Dead bad guys drop money, which can be used to buy food and other items to regain health and increase stats. For some stupid reason the game does not say what the item does until after you have purchased it. Also, it says that you can take some food with you, but I did not see what taking the food with you accomplished. There was no button that let you eat the food and regain health.
If Scott Pilgrim has something going for it, it is that the developers tried very hard to make the levels exciting. Each level is unique and has its own obstacles and backgrounds that differentiate each other. Same with the enemies; there are a ton of enemies that have different attacks that require different ways to kill them.
Bosses are fun to fight too. Each Evil-Ex is difficult, but not impossible to defeat. They always have some sort of unique attack that is challenging to figure out and overcome.
The soundtrack is also very good. It is a mix of retro video game music and rock, and it works very well together. And each level has its own track.
There is no story except for an intro story. However, the ending changes based on who beats the last boss.
Graphics deliberately evoke old two dimensional side scrolling beat-‘em-ups, though the sprites for this game are far more detailed than older beat-‘em-ups, and the backgrounds look almost hand drawn. They help make the game more interesting to watch than boring static characters.
There are way too many problems with the fighting that make this game difficult; not difficult in a challenging way, but in a cheap frustrating way that should not have been a part of the game. Player characters cannot block when in the middle of the attack or when opponents successfully hit you. Meanwhile, enemies can block anything until they do not feel like it anymore. Enemies can wait off camera as long as they want; making you think the game has crashed. There are no health items found in any levels outside of shops, and no extra lives, so any time you start a level with anything besides the default three lives, you have to kill yourself to get the continue and start over.
If those problems were gone, it would still be a difficult game, because levels have tons of enemies that attack at the same time and it is difficult to anticipate everything. But that difficulty can be overcome with practice and feels rewarding to accomplish.
The leveling up process is also a problem, because of the aforementioned lack of noticeable improvement. So instead you have to go back and play old levels again and again to farm money, to buy food, to power up, so you can get through the last three levels.
Scott Pilgrim vs. the World: the Game is a cheap, frustrating, unrewarding game. It looks nice, and is somewhat more decent when several people are playing it, but Ubisoft should have spent a lot more time fixing the problems with the fighting mechanics before releasing it.
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