PixlBit

I bet if you were to make a game that featured a cast of characters that includes demons, zombies, koala-men, Yetis, King Kong, vampires, werewolves, and wizards you'd make a twin stick shooter. What's that? That's a terrible idea? Yeah, I guess it is a pretty awful idea. Good thing the developers behind Ugly Americans: Apocalypsegeddon thought the same thing… Oh right, they didn't.

How a team managed to squander the immense potential of Ugly Americans is still blowing my mind. The show is full of great humor, a colorful cast of characters, and an absolutely unique setting where truly anything goes. 100% of this has been wasted in Apocalypsegeddon. The level design is non-existent, the gameplay is uninspired, and even the tale which it tells is done so with under-produced cut scenes, giving it absolutely no redeeming values.

If it wasn't obvious, I'm a pretty enthusiastic fan of Ugly Americans, but don't think I'm being extra tough on the game for its shortcomings. Even though a twin stick shooter isn't what I'd envision for a game based on this TV show, it still could've worked – but they threw that out the window when they put an isometric view on the action.

From this perspective, it's pretty hard to gauge depth and distance and exactly which direction you need to shoot in order to hit an enemy. This could be considered a learning curve of the game, but even after you get used to it, you're still guaranteed to have some amount of trouble because it is such an awkward view for such a shooter.

Assuming you can look past the awkward function of the core gameplay, the level design will surely ruin the experience. Like old isometric beat-'em-ups, you move left to right until the level ends. That's right, you are on a completely flat line in a generic section of New York City that does little to pull in the character of the show.

The enemies are equally as bland, despite their counterparts in the show being extremely dynamic. Hordes of zombies, bird-men, and demons are the primary foes, and they each have no distinguishable ability outside of rushing at you or shooting a projectile. Of course your strategy is do nothing more than avoid them and gun them down. Thus, there is no strategy whatsoever.

If you didn't think things could get worse from here, they do. There is an RPG mechanic built on top of this mess, wherein you slowly level up your character and earn points that you apply to different skill sets. Some levels are meant to outstrip your current skill level and though you can revive your co-op buddies, you're destined to die. Of course dying boots you out, allowing you to keep your experience and forcing you to slag through yet another level.

Yes, it's going to get worse still from here. There are multiple weapons in the game that you will pick up as you go. They are mostly generic things like hammers, baseballs, propane tanks, model rockets, etc. They all have a different flight trajectory and a varying amount of damage. But each has their own trade-off. With many of the stronger weapons, you'll sacrifice your health to hold them, mostly invalidating your efforts to level up your character. Due to this, every weapon is roughly equivalent, meaning that weapon variety provides no variety to your strategy as you'll always wind up sticking with the weapon with the least amount of trade-off for your given character.

Once you're done grinding through a set number of levels, you'll get a boss fight, which even with four players will still take forever and a day to complete. Because the bosses have an incredible amount of health and multiple phases, they are just as intolerable and bland as the general levels.

Despite the terrible gameplay, fans of the show could've at least enjoyed the scenes that are scattered between the game's levels; however, they managed to screw this up as well. The scenes aren't fully animated, but done by simply showing key frames of the animation. In short, this looks like garbage and is completely off-putting to observe. It's only worse that the actual voice actors from the show lent their voices for this.

Calling Ugly Americans: Apocalypsegeddon a bad game doesn't do justice to how badly they botched this entire production. It doesn't matter how much you love the show, don't buy this trash.