Gremlins 2: The New Batch

Review by CXKid

"It hurts my brain."

I bought this game thinking, ‘Hey cool Gremlins, I love that movie!' forgetting that games based on movies always, always, ALWAYS, suck because they're always, always, ALWAYS, attempts for companies to cash in on a movie's success rather than just make a genuinely good game. Anyway let's review this monstrosity.

Story 5/10
It's the same as the movie, Gizmo got captured, the kid from the movie, I forget his name, works at the lab and lets him free. Gizmo gets hit with water, and ta-dah, new batch of gremlins. So now Gizmo has to stop them.

Graphics 3/10
Aside from some completely static shots at the beginning when it's explaining the story the graphics are really bad. Nothing is very detailed and all the animations are two-frame animations. It's just terrible.

Music/Sound 6/10
Alright the music is catchy and there's a decent variety of tunes. But the sounds are your basic bleeps and bloops. And when Gizmo jumps, it sounds exactly like Mario jumping.

Gameplay 1.5/10
Gremlins 2 is your basic platformer. You walk right, jump over any obstacles there are, including but not limited to enemies, get to the end and fight a boss. Rinse and repeat with difficulty x10. Of course, unlike Mario, Gizmo can't kill enemies by jumping on their heads, that just hurts him and takes off one of his four hearts of life, yeah, they ripped off Zelda too. Instead the only ways Gizmo can dispatch his adversaries is by collecting one of three power-ups, yeah you have to collect a power-up to even be granted the right to kill enemies. Those three power-ups are, a pencil I think, which doesn't kill anything in one hit, has incredibly short range and can be used an infinite number of times once collected, a radio, which gives you a onetime use attack that kills anything in its path, and a box, which is basically invincibility. But I've been on one subject too long, enemies. The enemies are mostly profoundly stupid, much like the rest of the game. There's bats, wind-up toy rats, spiders, and gremlins. Oh yes, you fight gremlins as normal enemies even though it specifically says that only four new gremlins were made. I call bulls**t on that. There's no way the gremlins could possibly have been smart enough to immediately rush to a water source and start generating more gremlins and even if they were they couldn't possibly have done it that fast! Anyway then there's the bosses and good like figuring out who these things are, the first boss is this giant gremlin like four times Gizmo's size that throws tomatoes at you…what the hell? Anyway when and if you manage to kill him, which is no easy task, you go to a little mini-game where you have to mash all buttons to make Gizmo punch a punching bag, I'm assuming if you do it well enough you get an extra life or something.

Control 10/10
The controls are flawless. They're basic and responsive and really, what more could you ask.

Replay Value 2/10
Much like Penguin Wars, Battletoads, etc. I hated it the first time why would I play it again!?

Frustration Factor 10/10
This is another one of those games that's absurdly frustrating for no real reason. It's just horribly, horribly frustrating.

Fun Factor 1/10
This game is about as fun as getting bashed over the head with a bag of dead kittens.

Verdict 34% rounded to 3/10 for GameFAQs scoring
I sentence this game to be played by Satan for eternity.