Cartoon Network: Punch Time Explosion XL review

by Camjo-Z on Apr 7th, 2013

Cartoon Network: Punch Time Explosion XL is a Super Smash Bros. clone for Wii, PS3, and 360. I decided to spell it out right here at the beginning for anyone who hasn’t heard of it. You pick your colorful mascot and you duke it out in an arena trying to rack up your opponent’s damage percentage with smash attacks, special moves, assist characters, and items before knocking them off the stage. This game does almost nothing to separate itself from its obvious inspiration. However, is it as good as the game it’s attempting to ape? No. But feel free to keep reading and find out why.

The game’s roster is alright at best and underwhelming at worst. You’ve got your newer CN characters, like Flapjack, Chowder, and Ben Tennyson, some slightly older characters like Numbuh One, Billy & Mandy, and Mac and Bloo, and then there are the really old guys like Dexter, the Powerpuff Girls, and Captain Planet. Overall it manages to hit a decent balance, but the roster fails to get some of the big characters many were expecting. Old classics like Courage the Cowardly Dog and Ed, Edd, and Eddy and new favorites like Finn & Jake from Adventure Time and Mordecai & Rigby from Regular Show are nowhere to be seen. XL adds 8 new characters to the game bumping up the roster to 26 compared to the original 3DS edition’s 18, but even these are missed opportunities. Johnny Bravo is great, but Hoss Delgado? Scotsman? Toilenator? Kevin Levin? Who asked for these guys? They’re all great characters in their respective shows, but it feels like a huge missed opportunity when so many big names were left out.

Unfortunately, the character balance is nowhere near acceptable. Many characters draw from the same types of moves, which gives the game a samey feeling at times – expect to see a lot of spins, dashes, and reskinned projectiles from 90% of the cast. But the characters whose moves DO break the mold tend to be, well… broken. For instance, Flapjack’s counter can’t be stopped by any move, Aku’s aerial laser is near impossible to avoid, Hoss Delgado’s 8-way shuriken have way too much range, and Him’s crab-like dash gets a ton of meter way too easily.

Rare footage of two low-tier characters competing to see who can spam their worthless attack faster.

Speaking of meter, you have one at the bottom of your screen next to your damage percentage. You fill it by getting blue cubes that fly out of opponents when they get hit. These cubes allow you to use powerful moves called Punch Time Explosions, which you might know as Final Smashes from Brawl. These are just not balanced at all. For instance, Captain K’nuckles gets into a barrel and explodes… seconds after every player has plenty of time to get away. But Toilenator creates a giant toilet that sends out huge whirlpools to push you off the stage and then gets into a whirlpool himself to chase you down and collect enough cubes to get halfway to another PTE. It’s really ridiculous, and makes the character balance even worse. In addition to these, every character also has a “synergy attack” that they can use by getting a certain assist character (see: Assist Trophy). Both the assists and synergy attacks are just as unbalanced as the PTE’s but you don’t have to worry about them as much since the majority of them suck and the synergy attacks in particular are extremely hard to get anyways since you have somewhere around a 1/20 chance of getting it when you pick up the assist box.

However, at the end of the day, the balance does not matter because this game can barely be called a fighting game. If anything, it can be called a “mash the buttons and desperately hope you’re the winner” game. Everything feels really floaty, which is unfortunate because it’s extremely easy to accidentally go too high and kill yourself. The physics are horrible and have you constantly bouncing around the arena for no reason because the damage in this game doesn’t actually work like Smash Bros. despite appearing to. From about 0-60%, any hits you take will just make you slightly bounce back. After that, you’ll start flying around from the lightest of attacks. Item detection is also awful, as you have to be directly over an item to pick it up – if you’re even slightly to the side of the sweet spot, you’ll just grab at thin air instead. If you go into the game understanding that nothing makes any sense and you are basically playing a beta, you might have more fun with it. Suffice to say that it does not take a modicum of skill to play this game, nor does it matter if you have any.

If you can figure out what the hell is going on in this screenshot I stole from Gamespot then let me know.

At least there are numerous modes to “enjoy” in multiplayer. There’s Standard, which is a 3 stock match with items and assists turned on. If you want to play timed or get rid of items or something, you can pick Custom to set your own rules. PTE mode is basically Coin mode from Smash, except you’re trying to get the most cubes, and Drones mode has you attempting to beat up more generic enemies than your opponent. There’s also a Training mode you can mess around in but considering the game involves no strategy or skill, why bother?

For those not interested in multiplayer, there IS single player content in the game in the form of Story Mode and Arcade Mode. Story Mode can be played solo or co-op, and has you going through Subspace Emissary-like levels based on the worlds of each character, doing some light platforming and defeating random enemies from the shows like Ben 10’s robots or Chowder’s grapples. Few of the fights are mandatory though, so usually you’re better off just running past the enemies you meet. They also throw in some occasional things like FPS sequences, Angry Birds ripoffs, shoot ’em ups, QTE’s , and the obligatory mine cart level to add variety, but all of these parts manage to actually be worse than the regular combat so they end up being more of a nuisance than anything else. The plot is so boring and stupid that I’m not going to even bother talking about it, but I will say that despite being extremely text heavy none of the characters actually speak their lines (except for Space Ghost, the narrator), which is lame. Arcade Mode is the usual “go through a series of fights against random opponents” seen in many fighters, complete with useless intros and outros consisting of a single picture with some text that more often than not has nothing to do with the picture. It’s mostly useful if you want to play the game solo without repeatedly setting up matches. If you’re getting this game and plan on playing it alone you might have some fun, but really you want to play it with other people.

Not content with recycling moves from its own game, PTE even does it with moves from other games.

In terms of graphics and sound, the game is decent. All of the characters look surprisingly good and the environments look just like they did on TV. The music is mostly forgettable, but the voice work is generally well done – when it’s being done by the original voice actors, at least. Some characters, like Dexter, Johnny Bravo, and Father are voiced by soundalikes, which isn’t that jarring if you aren’t familiar with their original voices but will surely be an affront to fans of their series.

Even though it sounds like there is no redeeming factor to this game, I will say this: it is absolutely hysterical in multiplayer. The game’s physics make no sense. Nothing is balanced. When Aku dies, it sounds exactly like he’s saying “F*CK! INTO THE PIT OF HATE!” There are random glitches abound (one time I watched as my opponent stopped fighting me and slowly rose up into the air until he killed himself from going too high). All of this makes for some extremely amusing fights if you’re not going into the game looking for a competitive fighter of any sort. If you’re a big fan of Cartoon Network or want a bad game to laugh at, then you could do worse than Punch Time Explosion XL. Otherwise you will probably think the game is an awful, unfinished mess… actually, even if you like the game you’ll still think that.

Categories: News, Reviews