Thoughts on: Bubsy 4D

Bubsy has spent the last three decades of game history as a punchline to a bad joke. The series started as a “mascot platformer” in the early 90s, trying to chase gameplay feats of Mario and Sonic, as so many other similar games did, and the first couple of games had positive reviews at the time. Now, I personally haven’t liked a single Bubsy game until now and retrospective reviews seem to often write even the first titles off as mediocre games, but at the time Bubsy was just one of many. And not even the worst at being a mascot. But then in 1996 Bubsy 3D came out and nothing has ever been the same for the poor bobcat, who wasn’t as annoying as many people love to say. However, the game was hot garbage and so the franchise basically died with it.

After several rather bizarre attempts at revitalizing the series over the last decade, Bubsy 4D is a success. And while it’s not a great 3D platformer, it’s quite good if you like this sort of game. Which sort? I’ll try to explain.

So, I’m usually not much into platformers. There are very few series that I love or even like and most of those tend to be focused more on exploration and fun movement, rather than on challenge or precision. Of the 3D platformers, my most liked ones are Gex: Enter the Gecko and the original PS1 Spyro trilogy. They focus on exploration, secret finding and collection, but without going completely over the board with it like what titles made by Rare usually do. And they also try to build levels with fun different visual and gameplay themes with gimmicks and elements that are rarely, if ever, reused. Bubsy 4D is, overall, the same and that’s what I liked about it.

It also has quite solid basic movement mechanics. They’re not precise, in fact I’d even call the game handling a tiny bit sloppy by design, but you can combo moves into one another in fun ways trying to maintain the general momentum. Which, if you master it, will help you with optional rewards for beating levels quickly. I didn’t and instead focused on exploring and grabbing all of the collectible things and had fun in this way. The levels are quite varied and while some of them, in my opinion, were not really good, majority of them is great and full of fun little gimmicks. They’re also very pretty visually and the soundtrack, while not really my thing, also creates a very unique feel that sets Bubsy 4D apart from other similar titles.

The tone of the game is something, I feel, people might find odd a bit. It is very self-deprecating and I get it – Bubsy has become so overhated over the years. But now that you’re playing an actually good game with him, it feels very odd about how everyone is mean to him. Though, at least, they’re usually not cruel and a few recurring jokes I’ve found quite funny. Bubsy himself is still a talkative fellow, but I love Gex or Duke Nukem as is, so I’m not the best judge of if Bubsy can be annoying in this game for people who tend to dislike this type of banter.

I didn’t love the game, there are plenty of bizarre collisions, camera freaking out, odd bugs, poor boss design balancing and other issues that kept me far more frustrated than I hoped I would be. And the game is also shorter than it could’ve been – I’m usually all for shorter games, but in this case it felt a bit of an abrupt ending to the concept. But Bubsy 4D is good. It’s a solid foundation for something that could work as a follow-up with a bigger budget and more levels and more polish and all that good stuff. But it ain’t bad itself either.