Death, Jr. and the Science Fair of Doom (DS)

GameSpot editors' review

• CNET editors' rating: 2.0 stars Mediocre
  Detailed editors' rating
  Overall score: 4.9 (2.0 stars)

• Reviewed by:
  Alex Navarro
• Reviewed on: 05/22/2007
• Released on: 05/22/2007
• Originally published on GameSpot: Death, Jr. and the Science Fair of Doom (DS) Review

Somebody up there must really like Death Jr., though it's anyone's guess as to why that might be. As Konami and developer Backbone's attempt to create a platformer franchise for the PlayStation Portable with a morbid mascot hero (he's the son of the Grim Reaper, you see), Death Jr. has been anything but a success up to this point, with only two thoroughly unremarkable adventures to its name. Now the Death Jr. series has made its way to the DS, and most DS owners are likely to wish it had stayed on Sony's handheld system after playing though the mess that is the Science Fair of Doom. This new Death Jr. adventure includes the bulk of the flaws found in its predecessors, and adds a few critical new ones to the mix. The result is a platformer that veers wildly between dull and angering, but never toward fun.

If you're unfamiliar with the previous exploits of the son of Death, all you really need to know is that Death Jr. is an awkward, skeletal child that goes to school just like any kid--except that because he is a supernatural being, he goes to school with a bunch of other creepy creatures, like his ghostly white crush Pandora, the shy, unassuming, frequently bloody Stigmartha, the brainiac conjoined twins Smith and Wesson, and the snarky, quadriplegic foreign exchange student who lives in a jar, Seep. In this latest tale, Death Jr. and his buddies are off to the school science fair. Each of their projects is appropriately weird, and Smith and Wesson's combo project--a rabbit with demon parts stitched to it, and a miniature nuclear power plant--combines to open a portal to some fashion of a demonic realm. Everything goes haywire, the school gets transformed into a demon-realm iteration of itself, friends get kidnapped, monsters show up, and it's once again up to Death Jr. to save the day.

The premise sounds like perfect platformer fodder, but it doesn't hold up, mainly because the game is totally devoid of personality. As neat as all the characters in this creepy kids' tale sound on paper, they never come across in the actual game. The dialogue is bereft of humor, and the characters just play the boilerplate cartoon kid roles to the hilt. All the weird gimmicks for each character are just that: gimmicks. And Death Jr. (or DJ, as he's referred to often in the game) has zero personality to speak of. This same personality problem has plagued the previous Death Jr. games, but it's even more apparent here due to the lack of voice acting and the aimless plot. It's a charmless kill-all-the-monsters romp that won't hold your attention for long--especially once you dive into the gameplay.

Whereas earlier Death Jr. games featured fully 3D worlds to hop and swing around, Science Fair of Doom changes things up, retaining the 3D models and environments, but often relegating movement through the world to pure side-scrolling. Things open up in certain areas where you need to fight bad guys, but generally you're running to the right, and in some cases, the left, though the left is typically run toward only when you're forced to backtrack through a level, which happens a little too often for the game's own good. Granted, there aren't a ton of worlds to play through, but each individual world tends to be overly long and forces you to slog through a lot of the same scenery again and again.

That might be more tolerable if the activities you had to participate in while you move through the world were actually fun, but no such luck here. Mechanically, this is a pretty basic platformer. DJ uses a scythe as his primary weapon, and has a few basic attacks that go along with it. Combat has a bit more depth to it than the average game of this type, as you're offered some combos that upgrade over time, as well as a few additional weapons, like guns and C4 hamsters. Still, combat doesn't require much effort, and, in fact, most of the combo moves can be altogether ignored. You'll need the weapons for enemies that occupy particularly treacherous areas, or to bypass certain level obstacles, but otherwise you'll just hammer on the A button or tap on an enemy via the stylus and touch screen repeatedly and bang your way through the enemies with relatively little effort.

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