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Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer

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Got an hour? Bored as hell? Think it's worth 30 bucks to semi-cure it?

Words: Matthew Keast, GamesRadar US

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While we recently talked about how games can be short and sweet, there is a certain limit to how short you can go and still get your money’s worth. Let’s do some math here – a movie averages at 10 bucks for 90 minutes. The DS version of Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer costs 30 bucks and lasts about an hour. Okay, maybe someone might want to play it twice in order to unlock some stuff.

The length could be entirely forgivable if it had some hefty replay value, but alas, you can guess the answer to that question. FF4: RotSS involves three main elements: 2D side-scrolling brawling, top-down Raiden-style shooting, and a few stylus-centric boss battles.

First the brawling: you play one member of the quartet at a time, jumping on platforms, throwing switches, and occasionally beating up indeterminate foes (are they robots or mutants?). The Thing and Mr. Fantastic are basically the same. They can walk slowly, jump in awkward high arcs, and do a one, two, or even THREE button combo by pressing Y repeatedly. There’s a charge-up dash attack that contributes nothing. There are numerous slow-moving elevators that require a precisely-timed jumps, and if you miss you have to stand there for 30 seconds waiting for it to come back. Sue’s levels are slightly different because instead of jumping she hovers on a disc of force. It creates a brawler/side-shooter hybrid that has some interesting moments because you can so fluidly transition from flying to running.