Oh where is my hairbrush?! If your kids or you know where that line is from, you are a Veggie Tails nut aren’t you? If you only eat veggies and do not watch them on TV or DVD, no VeggieTails knowledge is required to read this review.
Larryboy and the Bad Apple is based on the DVD release with the same name. Since the game is based on the VeggieTails world, you get to meet many characters from the series such as Alfred your handy "gadgetman", or Mayor Blueberry and of course you get to battle the Bad Apple.
The city of Bumblyburg is celebrating its 300th birthday and Bad Apple is here to tempt the citizens of the town. The game is mission based where you have to enter each citizen’s "temptation" to rescue them from the evils of too much chocolate, toys or even videogames.
The game is a standard platformer, just minus the violence. Instead of shooting the few enemies you’ll encounter, you just knock them out with your spin move. In fact, I only counted about four enemies with different "outfits" depending on the level, I mean temptation. Larryboy also has a water gun for pesky spider webs that are in the way.
Levels are well designed with a very nice graphics and unique environments for each temptation. For example, the videogame temptation level has a tron like feel to it with tons of neon lights and huge platforms that you have to zip up to. There were some unbalanced parts of levels, for example: Alfred will sometimes practically tell you the answer to the puzzle in the room you are at, but then there are these extremely high difficulty jumps where children will have problems with. It just seemed like the developer Papaya Studios started making a level for a child, added a few insanely hard jumps and then returned to child level.
The controls are pretty easy to deal with: Larryboy has a spin move, a water gun, jump and an energy cape mode to power devices. You’d think hopping around an entire game would be annoying (Larry has no legs), but I found the hopping motion of Larry pretty fluid throughout the game. Gliding was quite fun to do; I have never played a platform game where I would intentionally find cliffs to dive off of so I could glide and soar. There were some problems with the double jump, sometimes Larryboy would glide instead of double jumping causing him to plummet to his death.
Graphics in the game are pretty nice for the Playstation 2, you will enjoy each levels unique look and feel. The sound is quite well done, the voices are straight out of the VeggieTails series and the acting is spot on. You might get annoyed at the same jokes that Larryboy cracks every time he uses one of his super powers, but other than that the music and acting is great.
Unlockables!!! Oh boy, here is where you may go slightly insane trying to unlock dozens of full songs from the series, I did not go out of my way to find these hidden songs and got about 75% of them without much effort. There are also thousands of musical notes to grab, some are even hidden in light poles or cupcakes that you need to knock out.
However, I did not find the Oh Where is My Hair Brush song, so now I must now go back to the "town square" and replay all the missions to find it. There are also some videos to unlock from the DVD, but I would prefer to work on the songs.
It is not often you have a Christian’s children’s series turned into a videogame and it is nice to see Crave Entertainment publish this game for VeggieTails lovers out there. Even if you are not a VeggieTails fan, this is a very solid platformer for any young gamer (or young at heart).
Oh, where is my hairbrush? Oh where is my hairbrush? Oh, where, oh, where, oh, where, oh, where, oh, where, oh, where, oh, where, oh, where oh, where … is my hairbrush?
Side note: Even though the back of the box says it is 1-2 players, that is only for the mini games you can unlock. The main game is single player only on the Playstation 2.
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