Tak: The Great Juju Challenge
September 25,2005 -

In the early days of the console wars, each warring faction needed to fill two requirements in order to stand a fighting chance; a solid gaming mascot and an even more solid platformer title for said mascot to jump around in. The golden age of platformers, for many gamers, was a time when Sonic battled Mario for supremacy of the market, and gamers reaped the benefits of quality sequels spurning higher quality sequels from the competition. Then platformers went third party, and every solid new Sonic & Co-Star title was met with a dozen or so hackneyed “Capybara with a Bad ‘Tude” platformer which lacked any gaming substance whatsoever but sold well due to the icon. With a few exceptions over the years, it still stands to reason that the platformer genre did as much to support the endless parade of franchise-assembly lining as it did to bring video gaming on the whole to every household in America. As the industry mires now in the Swamp of Sequels, with platformers far past their heyday as the must-own genre of games, it’s understandable that we, the enablers, support the release of such platformers as THQ’s newest sequel in the Tak series; Tak: the Great Juju Challenge. It’s really our own fault.

The tragedy of Tak: the Great Juju Challenge for the Gameboy Advance, is that every aspect of the game, from storyline and cut scenes to the sad attempts at music and sound effects, seems to be more of an afterthought. And that afterthought is this: let’s make as much money as we can from this franchise, and as soon as possible. The game, therefore, stinks of rushed minimal effort.

The story of the game follows Tak, the young hero of the Pupanunu tribe of Juju-users, and Lok, another tribe member, who are entered into some sort of intra-tribal Juju Challenge. Participants in the contest do their best to have each other killed by outrageously overdesigned traps, flying spears, dropped boulders, and terrifying walking trees in order to reign supreme. A lack of purpose is surrounded by a completely missing understanding of the principals of Juju, Challenges, and the other tribes. Each level of the game opens with a meeting with another tribe, like the turban-wearing swamis or the fur-bikini-clad Viking women tribe, who have supposedly designed this level of the challenge to stop Tak and Lok from winning the undetermined prize of the competition. While at times seeming like a race and at other times more similar to a life-threatening game of Mousetrap, the challenges of a missing plot are driven home again and again by the poor attempts at humor and the terrible grammar.

But the true punishment of Tak: the Great Juju Challenge, comes in the form of its 2D platformer failings. The game proposes a semi-innovative cooperative style of tag-team platform leaping. Tak uses his juju powers to fling purple phlegm great distances in order to kill enemies. Additionally, Tak can use his phlegm powers to summon platforms for Lok to leap on. Lok, on the other hand, uses a boomerang on a stick to hit enemies at close range, and compromises the brawn and speed of the party. By double tapping in any direction, Lok can be flung downwards or sideways to break walls or jump just a bit further and make the impossible-to-reach checkpoint seem almost possible to reach. Switching between characters, the player solves puzzles and progresses through 3 platform stages, 1 boss and 1 overhead cart race in order to clear the level and move to the next.

The problems in the gameplay are abundant, and again stink of the rushed afterthought motif of the game. Controls are terribly unresponsive, making the simplest task into an instant death as Lok misses his leap and falls down the endless pit of despair. Frustration quickly ensues. To make jumping matters worse, the view shows too little ground beneath the characters, so full-height leaps become a 50-50 gamble on finding solid ground beneath the character’s feet. The levels are uninspired and nonsensical in terms of relating to the themed adversaries. Why would Viking women build their challenge in the middle of a jungle? Puzzles fall into two categories: painfully obvious and easy, or painfully obvious and near-impossible. Even on the game’s easiest challenge level, making jumps or carrying eggs to egg-holders/door locks quickly turns into curse-words and button slamming. And as usual, the main adversaries of the game all shop at the same local Evil Scientist Warehouse, so the egg-holder door locks will perplex and make as little sense no matter what locality. While the boss fights of the game show some effort on the part of the designers, each boss presents a familiar platformer cliché dressed up in a Tak-styled getup, and so is easily defeated. And finally, the cart-race marking the final task of each level combines terrible controls, non-reactive powerups, and a general “What the…?!” mentality that will leave players scratching their head in confusion followed by annoyance, anger, depression and finally acceptance. Why are there cart races at the end of each level? Why does Tak throw purple phlegm? Even years of extensive Juju temple study cannot yield answers to such conundrums of life.

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