Time to review a game about a terrible mascot from the 90s who refuses to stay dead. Developed by Black Forest Games, this let’s take a quick look at  Bubsy: The Woolies Strike Back.

Some of you may remember that this game was included in my worst games of 2017 list and for good reason. For those of you who don’t know who Bubsy is, he’s a character who starred in two mediocre 2D platformers and one awful 3D platformer in the 90s and had a terrible TV show that was never greenlit.

Bubsy: The Woolies Strike Back is a return to form of sorts for Bubsy. He’s back on a 2D plane, but this time rendered in 3D. He still has his ability to glide, but can now also pounce through the air to defeat enemies in his way. 

To beat each level, you just have to make it to the end, but you can also collect 5 hidden keys to unlock a vault, find all 9 hidden shirts for extra lives and a shield, and attempt to get all of the yarn balls littering the stage.

This game is broken in more ways than one, but let’s start with the positive. This game does improve on a couple aspects of the original Bubsy games. The camera is pulled back to ensure everything stays in frame while running and Bubsy has less of an issue with momentum this time around.

His new pounce maneuver is also pretty good for dispatching enemies and his ability to glide is utilized in a cool way in the level with a bunch of fans. Oh, and the music isn’t half bad. Now that that’s out of the way, let’s talk about everything this game does wrong.

To start off, this game just feels incredibly lazy. The opening cutscene mostly consists of a camera zooming around a single picture and most of the other cutscenes are a bunch of static images with motion tweens applied.

As far as the visuals are concerned there are three regions to travel through and they contain about 6 enemy types and 3 bosses. Bubsy constantly talks throughout the entire game with lines repeating as early as the third level. That’s really soon considering these levels tend to be about 1 to 3 minutes long.

The gameplay doesn’t fair much better. Bubsy is just so boring to play. Collecting yarn balls isn’t fun because there are just too many of them around the stage to really care. Plus there’s no real reward for collecting them all so it just feels pointless. This then extends to the 5 keys since they only open a vault containing more yarn.

Top all of this pointlessness off with wonky hit detection on the enemies, slightly slippery controls, Bubsy not always wanting to scale a cliff right in front of him, and the insane amount of glitches I experienced during the boss fight and you would have a pretty bad game. But Bubsy isn’t content with just being bad. He has to go beyond.

Add to all of this the fact that the game only takes an hour to beat and costs 30 dollars and you have the prime example of a mascot that needs to go away and stay out of the gaming scene for good.

All in all, Bubsy just feels like a scam. An attempt to cash in on lets players and streamers playing the game for the novelty of having a new entry in a dead franchise. There was definitely someone on this team who was passionate about the Bubsy games, but they weren’t enough to save this failed experiment which is why Bubsy: The Woolies Strike Back for the PC gets a 3 out of 10. 

It’s not the worst game ever made, but it’s not enough to say Bubsy deserves to stay around. Anyway, I hope you enjoyed the review, if you did, please consider subscribing for more. And until next time, have a mighty nifty day today!