Death Jr. Root of Evil

Posted 4 years ago By - Brian Edey

Death Jr. Root of Evil was a fun but flawed Playstation Portable title released over a year ago and we now have a Nintendo Wii port of the same game, but do we have the same flaws or new ones to annoy the gamers with another bad port? Actually no, we have a well done fun port that has fixed most of the flaws from the original and given us a fairly decent story based game on part with Crash, Spyro and other similar 3D platform games.

In Death Jr. you play surprisingly as Death Jr. or DJ as he is lovingly referred to and as Pandora his girl friend as they embark on a quest to save his father and finish their science fair project at the same time. This fun quirky adventure has the makings of a fun classic title, even though it is a little on the short side.


Great gameplay is the best way to describe Death Jr on the Wii. All of the problematic control issues I had with the PSP version are gone with this 3rd person cursor controlled game and I must admit out of all the Wii games I have had to play this one was not a chore or a pain to re-learn how to play a game like so many of the Wii games we have seen.

Death Jr on the PSP had issues with the camera and I expected the same issues with the Wii port, but luckily they have been mostly fixed and if it was not for some bad control design choices the game would have played better and had awesome control. For example you can use the + and – to control the camera or the Z button for a more free look camera mode, but the + and – just did not seem to work well enough for me and I ended up playing almost all the game with the Z button held down.

Basic gun attacks are via the Z button, the B button is also a basic melee attack for both characters, but after that your waggle powers are needed as you gain new powers and upgrade them and you need to use the Wii-mote to flick and move to use these special new attacks. Overall the Wii-mote controls are very well done and are quick to pick up and master for even the most casual gamer and for once a Wii title that does not hurt or tire your arm and controls that actually work.

The two player multiplayer is a fun way to blow through the game and makes the easy title even easier but the experience is what matters and playing with a buddy actually makes Death Jr a fun multiplayer title on the Wii. If the campaign was longer I would have been more excited for the multiplayer but maybe in a future Death Jr. game a longer game with the same fun multiplayer component will be available.

Graphics

With some new added CGI, higher quality textures and models for the levels and an overall better looking presentation production value the game is not just a port of the PSP version. The graphics are still simple though, but actually I must say in a game like this I preferred the less is more approach and appreciate that the team porting the game from the hand held version could have gone less or even overboard on the graphics they seemed to realize the gameplay is what mattered and did not mess around with throwing more on the screen then was required.

The character and level designs are very well done and fun, especially the overall animations of Death and Pandora. Each characters specific personality comes through in the cut-scenes through voice over work, especially Pandora who loves her waffles a bit too much and has a sharp attitude and mouth.


Most of the audio is Death Jr is actually fairly good, with a catchy music track, some nice fun sound effects and usually good voice over work it makes the audio experience of Death Jr worth listening to. But some of the audio is actually annoying because of the dialog and simply how it is spoken and at times it became more then simple aggravation, but at least the actual annoying parts were short.

Each character has a fun and quirky voice over that shows the attitude of the character. While DJ and Pandora are both given great vocal actors to do their voice work, it does seem the other characters are hit and miss depending on the scene.


There is very little overall replay value in Death Jr., unless you are one of those players who enjoy beating the game on all difficulties and finding everything you can, but then again Co-op is fun and worth while but single player is just as good.


It is a decent way to waste a day or even a couple of days, but in the long run the game is not really worth buying unless you rent it first and truly love the title for its good and bad points. So RENT IT!

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