Review: Frogger Returns!

Developer: Hijinx Studios
Publisher: Konami

Posted by Chubiggans on March 9th, 2010 | 0 Comments | Tags: Frogger Returns

Very few $5 games exist anymore on either PSN or XBLA. The quality of games since just a few years ago have risen so dramatically that I don’t mind the new “premium” prices that pop up every once in a while if the quality redeems it.

But then you have Frogger, a five dollar throwaway title in every sense of the word. It does nothing for Frogger nostalgia, or anything else for that matter. It exists only to suck up as much money as it can before fading away into the vast nothingness of forgettable titles. The sooner I can forget it, the better.

Not that it’s reprehensibly bad, just utterly below average and boring, with horrible design choices. The perspective is skewed in such a way that I died while leaping to something that I thought was a jump away, on more than one occasion. The overlay/presentation is completely lackluster, with generic fonts and tiny numbers signifying power-ups and scores. There are four levels and four trophies, and no online support whatsoever for leaderboards or gaming.

There are four modes: Arcade, which has you going though the four levels on three lives in a limited time. There’s also Time Trial (time counts up, no score), Score Attack (time counts down, score), and Free Play (no time, no lives). The four trophies are given for beating the four levels, which would actually be rather hard in Arcade mode had it not been for the fact that you can get the trophies in Free Play. Whoops.

There’s also a multiplayer mode where you can race a friend, but why you would do that to someone, I’m not sure. Poor Frogger deserves better.

A copy of this game was purchased for review purposes. For more info on our review policy click here. This review is for the PlayStation 3 version of the game.