Ribbit King review

If there was ever a wrong message to be sending out to the kids, then it's the intro sequence from Ribbit King. A bulbous-eyed freak approaches Atari's cutesy character, Scooter, and offers him a ride on his rocket. Despite the concerned protests of his talking picnic hamper (don't laugh) Scooter decides to go with him. Utter madness. But don't worry, the creepy alien isn't trying to perv him up. He merely wants to chauffeur him around the Frolf Championship. Phew. Hang on. Eh?!

Ribbit King follows the quest of Scooter, a space boy who's entered a Frolf championship to save his planet from dying... Jesus. Frolf is basically a cross between posh folks favourite, golf and slimy pond-dwelling frogs. Instead of using clubs, you use a mallet and instead of hitting a ball, you hit the frog (obviously). Your task is to knock the frog into a well, and that's it. Unlike golf and its hazardous water/sand traps, Ribbit King has giant webs, stomping elephants and hungry snakes. Plus if your amphibious projectile hits the water, it'll just swim back to land.

The graphics look sweet enough, but under its glossy exterior, Ribbit King is a pile of puerile nonsense. Adult gamers will find it embarrasingly basic and kids would much prefer to mash up real frogs than play this. To make matters worse, the code we're playing is am off-the-shelf copy, and it's littered with glitches. Once we became stranded on an icy surface, and no matter how many times our tiny frog hopped, it still couldn't right itself.

Ribbit King is appealing for the first couple of mallet-filled minutes, but it quickly descends into such brainless monotony that you could be driven to find a pond and do some serious Kermit crushing. You're much better off clubbing a tiger in Mr Wood's more superior title.

Ribbit King is teeing-off in shops now for PS2