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Full Mojo Rampage

Score: 75%
ESRB: Teen
Publisher: Nicalis
Developer: Over the Top Games
Media: Download/1
Players: 1 - 2 Local; 2 - 4 Online
Genre: Shooter/ Action

Graphics & Sound:

Full Mojo Rampage takes a roguelike approach to twin-stick-shooters. As a result, it provides an experience that you can easily jump into and play, but also one that is a steady challenge as the game is never the same twice.

Full Mojo Rampage fills the screen with a wide variety of environments. You will play through everything from deserts, to creepy dungeons, or even nighttime landscapes filled with glowing plants. As for the inhabitants of these strange lands, both your character and the enemies have enough detail and unique design in their models so that the top-down view doesn't do the characters any injustice.

The game's music has a playful nature to it, which lightens up the overall feel of the game quite a bit. Given the generally dark nature of the visuals and subject matter of the game, the music does a good job of balancing out the overall experience.


Gameplay:

Full Mojo Rampage's roguelike nature means that each time you start the game, you will find yourself facing newly configured levels, and while your mission in each level is primarily driven by the quest you chose to work through, just because the objective is the same from play-to-play, doesn't mean that some of the generated maps won't be harder than others.

The game contains four main quests, and it is the levels in these quests that will unlock various features in Full Mojo Rampage. Primarily these are various stat or attack modifiers for your character, but, when you've completed a quest, the reward can also be a new quest or gameplay mode to try out.

Before starting a quest, you will get the option to customize your character in different ways. You can choose between different masks, voodoo pins or voodoo Loa (gods). While the masks are just for looks, the pins give different stat boosts and the Loa you choose changes the attacks your character has available to it. As you unlock more options, you will be able to find combinations of these elements that should fit your gameplay style, but making progress in Full Mojo Rampage isn't easy - more on that later.

The levels themselves are filled with various enemies, each with their own tasks designed to keep you from completing your quest, and they come in many shapes and sizes. You will often find the bigger enemies with larger health bars near your objectives, while smaller ones are much more frequent and do a good job of swarming you. Levels also contain a plethora of items for your character to pick up and either gain stat boosts while equipped, or provide attacks that are more powerful than your standard, but with limited ammo.

Outside of the four main quests, Full Mojo Rampage also features a mode called Night of the Dead Spirits. Here you will need to survive a set number of enemy waves in a claustrophobic arena. Once you've beaten that, Survival Unlimited unlocks, which is similar to the previous option, but without the wave-cap. This game also features an Endless Run Mode. Here you will play through dungeon after dungeon. Between these levels everything from the type of dungeon to bonuses or drawbacks can change, but even without these changes, this mode is designed to make each level harder than the last.

Full Mojo Rampage also features a Daily Quest option. Each day, a dungeon is generated and everyone can try their hand at it. The benefit to this mode, besides earning experience and money, is bragging rights as the game lets everyone know who the previous day's winner is all day long.


Difficulty:

Full Mojo Rampage is deceptive. It looks and feels like it shouldn't be too hard to work through, but the randomly-generated nature of the game means that each time you die, you not only have to start from the beginning of the quest, but the levels you were able to work your way through look completely different.

Your only real saving grace is that you don't lose the experience or money that you've collected in the levels when you die. This means that your character will steadily level up, and you will be able to buy more and more customization options. With these two aspects constantly growing, you can and will eventually make your way to the end of each quest and unlock the next quest and Loa. The game just ends up becoming a grind really quickly.


Game Mechanics:

Full Mojo Rampage offers a couple of multiplayer options that can change the dynamic quite a bit. First off, the online co-op option lets up to four players take on the same dungeons side-by-side. Each player chooses their customizations and jumps in to complete the quests. This is actually fairly straightforward and what you would expect in a co-op mode for a game like this.

Where Full Mojo Rampage gets a little odd though, is with its local co-op feature. Instead of allowing a second player the ability to customize and create their own fighter, the second player becomes a nerfed copy of the main character. While the second player can attack enemies, they can't pick up items or open chests. To make matters even stranger, when the second player joins the game, the first player takes damage, and that health becomes the new fighter's health bar. Thankfully, after that initial hit is taken, the first player can build its HP back up, but it was still surprising the first few times it happened until we figured out exactly what was going on.

Is Full Mojo Rampage for everyone? No, definitely not. It is a game that will force you to start from the beginning over and over again. As a result, it can get frustrating. Personally, I found that I couldn't play it for more than an hour or so at a time before I had to walk away for a bit. That being said, you do experience a steady progress in your character's capabilities and you do find yourself making progress in each quest, it can just feel like a grind a lot of times.


-J.R. Nip, GameVortex Communications
AKA Chris Meyer

Related Links:



Microsoft Xbox One RevErsi Quest Sony PlayStation4 Drawful 2

 
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