Scooby-Doo and the Cyber Chase - TRON, but bad.

18/03/24

Similar to when I played He-Man a few weeks back, I find Scooby-Doo has a similar presence in my brain. I mean, I liked it enough as a kid, but my exposure was mostly from the so-bad-it’s-good live action movies, and some copied video tapes of the original series. I’ve got no strong feelings for Scooby-Doo as a franchise, but that’s not the case for today’s game, Scooby-Doo and the Cyber Chase. No, no, don’t get your hopes up. Whilst Cyber Chase is perfectly playable, it is a subpar experience from start to finish, it’s small notable bells and whistles doing little to dissuade from the fact that this game is just not fun to play, especially when coupled with some utterly baffling decisions in regards to its general structure.

I wish we had more budget-related information in regards to these shovelware, cash-in titles. I mean, how many copies of Scooby-Doo and the Cyber Chase did they need to break even (I’m not gonna mince words - I’m guessing not many), and how much did the thing cost to make in the first place? There are simply so many of them, bare bones, two hour long titles that they can’t cost that much, can they? Cheap, cheap, cheap - that’s the thing that defines the vast majority of these titles. But I don’t want to be cruel - how much money is pumped into a game isn’t what defines its quality… but it does help. It really, really helps, and despite some surprisingly strong animation… Scooby-Doo and the Cyber Chase does not indicate a particularly robust budget, or to be honest, much care at all.

From what I can gather - from the film’s Wikipedia article, as for the purposes of this review, I’m not watching a bloody Scooby-Doo movie - Cyber Chase is a pretty ‘accurate’ adaptation of the film. A cyber ghost (I’ll always know him as SPINDLY JOHNNY, thanks to Caddicarus) is terrorizing a group of scientists, and the Mystery Inc. gang will have to traverse and complete a number of video game levels - by going *into* the games themselves - to hunt down the Cyber ghost. What follows is a very, very strangely structured game with very little narrative, just playing out the plot and little more. It has some fun, almost diegetic elements to it, like the game’s ‘life’ system being essentially what members of Mystery Inc. have available, since failure in a level leads to them being captured by Spindly Johnny and unavailable for the rest of your playthrough.

In a word, Scooby-Doo and the Cyber Chase is… odd. Whilst it does at first give you the impression of being an adventure game, starting out in a science lab, you quickly discover that this location is pretty much three rooms and a hallway. You’ll literally only be here to go to the otherwise empty rooms, grab some CDs, and move to the gun from TRON that puts the Mystery Inc. gang into the game. I just don’t understand the decision to give the game a hub world with… nothing in it, sans CDs that’ll unlock (without doing anything to earn them, at that) the minigame-levels that actually make up the bulk of the game. Why not just paint the game for what it is - a minigame collection. Give it a linear level select, or something, and not get my hopes up It just feels so… pointless, which is a pretty cruel thing to say about any game, really, but it feels so cobbled together, transient, and above all, cheap, that it really doesn’t give me much incentive to review it. But… Well, I’ll try.

Let’s talk about the *actual* content of this fantastically short game. Now, there are typically three kinds of ‘levels’ in Cyber Chase. Most commonly, you’ll be exploring rather large, expansive side-scrolling areas, where you’ll be tasked with reaching the box of Scooby Snacks at the end, whilst collecting enough individual Scooby Snacks to make it appear. Secondly, there are a handful of auto-scrollers, where your chosen Mystery Inc. member will ride a vehicle and, uh, do the exact same thing in the platformers. Lastly, there are actually a number of ‘boss fights’ to engage in, but sans the final encounter with the Cyber Ghost, these are incredibly throwaway and make an infinitesimally small proportion of this already miniscule game. Seriously, you could blow through this game in less than an hour, assuming you don’t get a game over and forget the custom passwords. Oh yeah, since this game has a scoring system for… some reason, you’re not gonna get basic passwords like most games. Oh no, these are incredibly complex, impossible to remember without writing the bloody things down. So that’s fun.

Each member of Mystery Inc. is essentially the same in how they handle in the platforming stages - you can jump, you can throw a fruit to stun - but not eliminate - foes, and you can tap a shoulder button to put an item over your head to… hide? I’m really not sure what it does, since pretty much every time I used the damn thing, I took damage from whoever I was trying to avoid. So, uh, yeah. That’s a thing. There is nothing here that’ll give you a surprise, nothing to define it. Maybe, just maybe, this game has something, *anything* to make it stick out at all.

Don’t hold your breath.

In regards to the actual levels of the game, without a doubt, the auto-scrollers are far and away the most inherently frustrating sections of the game. Incredibly fast paced, threats will come from below and above in tandem, growing in frequency as you near the end, and unless you know exactly what you’re doing, the damage will build and your chosen Mystery Inc. will kick the cybernetic bucket. The incredibly fast speed leads to actually nabbing all the Scooby Snacks you need way, way harder than you’d expect it to be - I failed pretty much all these missions at least once, and for in this case, this didn’t actually have anything to do with my general sense of ineptitude. But the original sin of these levels is the fact that, even after collecting all the Scooby Snacks you need, you can just… miss the box, due to the speed in which it passes you by. That alone is just a… just a baffling decision to start with, but you don’t get a fail screen, or anything like that - you’ll just loop the level again, recollect those Scooby Snacks, and hopefully not just die on the spot. Of course, with the brutal speed of many of the threats, it might as well be a game over anyway. But I digress - these levels are just unfun, even if they aren’t quite as janky as the rest of the game. The bulk of the game, at that.

And whilst the auto-scrollers might have the inherent, egregious sins, the platformers do not fare any better. This game feels like *ass* to control, simply put. Incredibly floaty, no double jump, and just when you’re jumping around, there’s a genuine lack of control as to what you’re doing, leading to a screw up when you’re trying to climb platforms. There’s nothing fun about exploring these bland, repetitive environments, hunting for Scooby Snacks, *especially* in the case of the atrociously boring jungle level, which is pretty much *nothing* but shoddy, vertical platforming. In addition to this, the inability to throw projectiles whilst in the air dooms you to taking damage from this game’s incredibly fast foes, and has the bonus factor of probably knocking you back down to ground level if you were doing any kind of notable platforming at this time. To make matters worse, some enemies have incredibly janky, broken hitboxes, leading to me taking hits when there is still a notable gap between me and the foes. The carnival level can go die somewhere, to be honest.

A bunch of the levels also have this rather ominous countdown timer in the corner of the screen that, naturally enough, I assumed would give me a fail screen if it ran out. Hell, in the jungle stage, I ran out of life on purpose since I was so certain of this fact, growing more and more enraged at how tight the time limit for such a frustrating stage was. Fact is… I *think* all the timer does is spawn an unkillable, boss-like foe that makes your life worse, since I had several moments where the timer ran out and… nothing happened. Utterly bizarre game design, and that’s putting it lightly.

There’s the boss fights, too, but they’re an almost non-factor of the game; only the battle with the Cyber Ghost feels like it has any real strategy to it, having to platform through the room to obtain the items to defeat him, but that just brings you back to the fact that the platforming is even more atrocious with a boss kicking your ass along the way. The others are just encounters in tiny rooms where you have to deal with very basic mechanics to gain the means to take them down, posing almost no threat at any point. I think an argument could be made that these are the best part of the game, and if you’ve been paying any attention to my review so far, that does not set a particularly high bar of quality, now does it?

Whilst I find the art direction of the game to be rather weak, uninspired, and in some cases, such as terrain design, outright bad, the animation for the Mystery Inc. characters is surprisingly fluid and impressive for a game that’s otherwise so… cheap in every way. Pretty much everything else lacks a general sense of fluidity. Enemies that have only two or three frames of animation, static backgrounds, that kind of junk. I didn’t expect much from a licensed, shovelware-esque title, but even then, I’ve been let down. Its soundtrack is, ultimately, quite limited, but it has a few catchy renditions of the ever-so-iconic original Scooby-Doo theme that are pleasant enough to hear. It’s just a shame that the rest just kind of fades out into the background, probably overwritten by my ever-growing rage at just how bad this game feels to play.

What I’m trying to get at is, almost from moment one, Scooby-Doo and the Cyber Chase just isn’t fun to play. Even in the rare moments you get into some kind of groove, it’s blocked at nearly every turn by janky platforming, whacked up giant hitboxes and just genuinely boring level and gameplay design. Pretty much every element, outside of the soundtrack and maybe, *maybe* the boss fights, I’ve found lacking. It’s not atrocious, it’s very playable unlike something like Kong: King of Atlantis, it works (for the most part), but there’s not a single reason to play this over… literally anything else, including the other Scooby-Doo games present on the GBA. Man, if these are worse then Cyber Chase I’m… I’m not gonna be a happy chap.

Thank you so much for reading my review of Scooby-Doo and the Cyber Chase! Not… a great time, to be honest, but it was quick enough that it really didn’t bother me too much. I’ve got a few upcoming games planned that should all be pretty entertaining - for better or worse. Hopefully, you’ll be getting a decent streak of reviews every week, as I really want to be ready for a special review near the start of April, to coincide with, let’s say, the biggest event in Sports Entertainment. As always, you can find me on Twitter @Lemmy7003, email me at mgeorge7003@hotmail.com or cckaiju@gmail.com, and I’ve started streaming on Twitch under GameBoyAbyss! Thanks again for reading, and I’ll see you in my next review!