Joe Danger succeeds in being a thoroughly simple and fun game. From the controls to the aim of the game and individual events Joe Danger’s set out simple enough, any of your mates can instantly understand how to play and its with friends the game itself really takes off.
The 1 player story mode is set out to teach you the basics you need, to complete the progressively harder events and challenges. Joe Danger himself was an amazing rider, who crashed while trying to pull off a stunt. Making his comeback, you start the stunt weekly tour which is basically the tutorial tour giving you the understanding of how to manoeuvre Joe both on the track and in the air. It’s after this initial tour where Joe Danger starts to become great fun to play.
HOT
Story & Tours
From the “Comeback Tour” to the “Grand Finale” through sections such as “Explosives Tour” and “The Danger Zone” Joe’s task is to collect enough Gold stars to unlock new events. These stars are how the game progressively gains in difficulty. You gain a gold star for collecting all silver stars in a level, hitting targets specially positions throughout the level or even comboing the entire race. While in the early races these are easy to acquire towards the end of the storyline where you must combo the level while hitting all the targets it gets hard: at this point in the game to collect those final gold stars you’ll make full use of the instant restart button, but they well keep you hooked to obtain those elusive stars.
Unlocking levels at the beginning will set you back 1 gold star, with the events getting progressively harder the amount of gold stars to unlock them also rises. The final level in each Tour, which is normally a race, once completed will open up the next Tour for the player. With 11 Tours including the bonus tour after the final level the game offers a very decent amount of content straight from download, but the game also offers a great sandbox mode.
Unlimited Events
Sandbox mode allows you to create your own levels, choose from the four game backgrounds and if it’s an event for big scores and combos or a multiplayer race. Plenty of ramps and objects are in the sandbox to full your creative needs. Size is never a problem in Joe Danger’s sandbox mode; you can make and save up to 10 levels at a time, which can all have 16 sub sections. With only a couple of sub sections you can create a marvellous level.
Upload & Download
Not the best at creating yourself or maybe you want to show off, to your mates, just how good your latest level is. Simply upload the level and send it to your friends via PSN or download you mates levels to widen the range of level you have available to play. This feature combined with sandbox means you can always have a brand new level to entertain you keeping the game more enjoyable.
Controls
The pure simplicity of the controls makes it a hot feature in the game. With the trigger buttons for acceleration and brake, ‘X’ for boost and square to duck and jump the controls are easily picked up allowing you to pick up and enjoy for 5 minutes or play for hours. Also with a quick tap of L1 and/or R1 Joe pulls a trick whilst in the air. The controls make the game simple and fun for both gamers and casual players equally.
Style
Joe Danger’s graphics are very pleasing on the eye, with a colourful cartoony style which fits the fun gameplay well. The obstacles in the game appropriately are also in a cartoon style; oversized mousetraps and exploding rockets create the prefect atmosphere for players to enjoy the game. Certainly crashing out of a race due to a ridiculously large mousetrap is a lot less frustrating than more traditional obstacles which is why the style really helps push the fun factor of the title.
Split screen
Playing with friends extends the single player fun and will make the punch button even more satisfying when your friend ends up flying off his bike and not just an AI character. The game comes with six split screen races for you straight from download but once you have played them a number of times and would like a change any levels made in the sandbox can also be played as split screen levels so as long as you keep making or changing the 10 sandbox levels you could always play a different level. The great part about split screen is that you don’t have to just taking it in turns like other PSN games.
NOT
Sandbox objects
While the sandbox mode is great unfortunately not all of the games objects are available for you to use in the create mode. Although most objects are useable things such as the hover pad aren’t and it would have improved the game if there were extra objects to unlock and use in the sandbox mode.
Online
Split screen vastly improves the game but sometimes your mate just can’t pop round. Online multiplayer would have been a great additional feature to Joe Danger and I doubt it would have been that hard to implement. Races in game at maximum have 6 characters online even 2-4 players would be extremely fun, but alas it wasn’t built into the game.
VERDICT
With colourful fun and entertaining gameplay alongside the sandbox mode which will allow players to always have a brand new level to play the game takes a simple concept and makes it thoroughly enjoyable. Play for only a few minutes or sink many hours into this title and either way you’ll enjoy it as it takes possibly frustrating crashes and makes you just laugh it off. While it’s simple it still gets progressively harder testing your reaction times and to gain all Gold stars would take a lot of dedication. Unfortunately the lack of an online multiplayer does mean it misses out on the highest ratings but overall it’s a great PSN title and certainly worth a try.
