Ice Cream Surfer (Wii U) Review

Ice Cream Surfer harks back to a time when there needed to be as little time between the player turning on a game and getting stuck into the action. It's no surprise, then, that the title sequence gets the "story" out of the way within two text boxes (the evil broccoli is taking over the world to make everyone eat tasteless vegetables - and that's almost an exact quote), and after a quick character select screen, it's time to plunge straight into the first level to start shooting the bad guys. No tutorials, no explanations, no time wasted.

The game is a fairly standard horizontal arcade shooter affair. Enemies come forwards in groups, and players move all over the screen to blow them up before they do the same. As expected, there are plenty of power ups to make the shooting job easier. Gems fill up a "Power" bar, which allows an attack to be unleashed that destroys all enemies on the screen; ice lollies power up shots; and spoons give a little ice cream buddy who will double the amount of shots and take a hit in place of the main character. There's also the individual letters for "ICE CREAM" to collect in each level, though it seems these do nothing but improve the score (oddly, the game keeps track of which letters have been collected in each level, though offers no reward for collecting them all).

Similar to games like Parodius or TwinBee, this shooter prides itself on its wackiness. There will be greetings by penguins, vegetables, electrical appliances and more in Ice Cream Surfer, all presented in charming pixelated graphics which seem to be aiming for somewhere between the SNES and the Saturn. It's fair to say that while this game won't be winning over tough crowds for its visuals, it is bold, bright and vibrant, with fairly detailed backgrounds, just like the aforementioned titles. Unfortunately, partly as a result of this, it can be very difficult to distinguish bullets from bonuses, which leads to more than a few frustrating deaths. With that being said, this game is still not especially difficult (this is no Ikaruga) as there are rarely many enemies on the screen at one time. The "Game Over" screen will probably be seen a few times on the first time playing to the end of all six levels, but far less, if at all, on subsequent playthroughs…

…If anyone had any reason to play through the game again, that is. Simply put, while the game can be fun, it does absolute nothing that hasn't been seen before. It's pretty simple even by older game standards. If this game had come out on the SNES or Saturn (which given its tiny length it easily could have) it would have been buried under the heaps of far more impressive and difficult shooters in their respective libraries. Nowadays it may appeal to a slightly larger audience of shmup fans who have been given slim pickings to play with, but its gameplay simply feels uninspired and unpolished.

Aside from the seemingly-random deaths mentioned earlier, the game also suffers from a large amount of slowdown at times (which is completely inexcusable on a console like this) and simply broken boss fights. Half of the bosses can be beaten by standing above them where their bullets will miss and slowly chipping away at their health bars in their "resting" phases. The other half requires minimal movement to avoid being hit (all but one has somewhere on the screen where the attacks will never hit the character), and boss battles end up feeling tedious rather than challenging.

Perhaps the biggest insult of this game to the genre it hails from is the lack of a high score table, neither online nor local. For an arcade shooter it is simply unfathomable that the developers didn't include at least a local one, as high score hunting is the main draw of short games such as this. The top score is recorded and displayed at all times at the top of the screen, but no name is placed against it so it's a long way from the competitive challenge it could have been. There's no incentive to get high scores, nothing in the way of extra game modes and the only unlockables are a few pieces of dull concept art found in Gallery option on the main menu. Ice Cream Surfer can be comfortably completed in under an hour and there's little reason to replay the six levels in the game, which makes even the budget price a little difficult to justify.