Indiana Jones and the Staff Of Kings | a Review
originally published on 07/04/2021;
Hello everyone, I am the renowned Archaeologist G.E.M.Simov, a menace to society and its history, come here to tell you the story of Indiana Jones and the Staff Of Kings, the officially licensed PSP game… I know, what?
Simple review details - I rank games on an out of 10 basis, granting up to 3 points in 3 categories, as well as a last, single point from my own self, depending on my experience with it. Also, I am a gameplay designer and a writer so I got the credentials to talk shit.
Gameplay
This game is a 3D puzzle-platformer… That’s actually an… An action game with puzzle-platformer-adventure game aspects. It’s more of a beat ‘em up than anything else. Indiana Jones is the main character the player gets to play, and that’s that.
Right off the bat, the game is separated in levels. Before each level begins, the player is presented with the option to pick from 3 difficulty levels (with none that can be unlocked), and is presented with a set of challenges. Each challenge presents the player with Fortune and Glory. Fortune amounts to extras - like concept art, music jingles and other vanity things. Glory amounts to actual gameplay updates, so if a level is giving the player trouble, they can use their Glory to make themselves stronger, or go through an old level and complete all the challenges, to then get the most Glory out of it.
It seems like it’s got a really solid foundation on how to urge the player to replay the levels and it presents challenge in a reasonable, fun way. That’s good. What is NOT good is that the challenge of this game is actually unreasonable - it’s owed up to bad controls, which are clunky, at best, a very shoddy combat system that features a dodge roll, which does not actually make the player dodge attacks, it just moves them slightly quickly. Then there are also bugs.
You’d think a game like this does not have bugs - I mean, it is a licensed game, it should not have bugs - let alone in the first two levels - but it does. Sometimes things don’t actually happen the way they should. Sometimes the character gets stuck. Sometimes the camera is bafflingly poorly positioned.
Did I mention the game is slow and clunky?Anything relating to the combat is such, but then everything else is also slow and unpleasant to deal with. Walking, or, rather, running, is at best a slow jog, the gameplay keeps getting interrupted by short cutscenes showing the player where to go and what to do, climbing up anything takes a lot longer than it should (and thus it does not feel good). Worst thing is that the GUN (Indiana Jones does have a gun) can be used in battle, but it is so slow that, by the time it is used, the enemies are already on top of the player. Sure, one of them will instantly die - because he has been shot with a gun - but the rest will start PUMMELING Indiana Jones as if there’s no tomorrow.
There is a lock-on feature, but it is as clunky as the rest of the combat system. It requires that the player holds down the Left bumper/trigger. If they let go of it, they no longer lock on to anything, and they no longer try to block incoming attacks from the target that is being locked onto. The means of selecting a target to lock onto are also quite mysterious and, as it seems, do not work well, because, even if the player is facing a certain enemy and uses the lock on button, they might suddenly find themselves swiveling at 180 degrees to lock onto another enemy.
One of the worst parts of this issue with the unresponsiveness and slowness of the game is that there is an atrociously slow turn-rate. The turn rate is the speed at which the character rotates around their axis when they are being directed to walk in a different direction. Instead of instantly changing their path and walking left, they must first stop moving, turn left, and then start walking in that direction. This is abominably bad.
However, I’d like to give some credits. The puzzles - what few of them that there are - are actually very well thought out. They’re interesting, they’re not too overwhelmingly hard, they’re just the right mix of ingredients to be good, if implemented right. Alas, this has been much like Communism - great in concept, but horribly executed. 1/3
Presentation
This game came with a decent booklet that looked neat, and explained a few things, but did not really go anywhere. The game features the music from the movies, so it’s not that bad, right? Well, in fact, it doesn’t seem to be bad at all. For a licensed game, it looks relatively decent. I can’t quite tell if the voice actor for Indiana Jones himself is Harrison Ford, though I doubt it, but, if it isn’t, that’d mean there’s also some good voice acting in the game, too. Though it’s not astonishing, mind you.
The visuals are what you’d expect from a higher end PSP game that requires loading before each level. In other words, it looks presentable, and quite decent. The UI is also not bad at all, and the menus all have that Indiana Jones 1920s aesthetic to them. It’s not bad at all, though it does look a bit scuffed. That’s from the hardware limitations, I’m certain, because they were going for realism, and going for that, on a PSP, is an insurmountable challenge.
All those things are well and good. But there is a very, VERY glaring issue. There are sections of the game that take away the player’s ability to control the camera, and, as a result, the camera is preset. Those sections are dangerously bad, however, because of the fact that the point of view that the player is presented with, the angle they see the character and the game at, is bad. It involves them needing to slowly walk along a narrow path while avoiding swinging objects, obstacles, that deal a lot of damage and reset their progress.
These obstacles are shown to the player in a nasty perspective, and the player can never quite tell how wide they are or, at some points, at which point of their rotation they are. This creates added difficulty that is arbitrary and only makes the whole experience worse, due to the fact that the camera is not set perpendicular to those swinging obstacles. Having a mistake like that in your game makes its presentation very, VERY flawed. 1/3
Story
None of the Indiana Jones movies has a very interesting or compelling story, in my humblest of opinions. This game does not follow along the movies, and, thus, it is a separate adventure, in which, as you would expect, the Third Reich is present and it is the BIG BAD, though it is established from the first cinematic of the game that the Germans are actually assholes, and nothing comes as a surprise.
The game fails to deliver an engaging story-line, even though it does have one interesting, incredibly good bit to it - the premise. I think that might have been what carried the whole Indiana Jones franchise, to be fair. The premise is insanely good, and it’s superb in quality. An archeologist going and exploring ancient tombs, getting in fights with all kinds of baddies and wooing sweet ladies? If that isn’t a rocking premise, I don’t know what is.
The fact of the matter is that having Ancient Ruins, and the opportunity to go HAM when it comes to what you find in them, is astonishing. This is something that has the potential to never grow old, because of just how much potential it has. That’s what holds this story together, frankly, and, without it, the story would have been… Very underwhelming. As it stands, it is JUST underwhelming. 1/3
Legendary Point
Does this game get the legendary point, so craved and wanted by all and none at the same time? Naturally, the answer is NO. This game has the makings of being a very good game, but it needs a lot of fleshing out to become such a thing. As it stands, it’s very, very far from eliciting a great reaction within me, or, at least, a positive one. 0/1
Conclusion
3/10. This game is not good. If you are a fan of Indiana Jones, and just can’t get enough of him, play this game on the lowest difficulty setting and enjoy it. It’s… It’s not good. It’s very close to being BAD.
On the wall of shame, I hang this game. Alas, it could have been so much better, but something happened and it did not reach the peaks it could have been destined for.