The Basics:

Mascot Manor takes place in OuterWorld, which is a place where AFL (Australian Football League) mascots do battle against each other to win team spirit.  One day Toby, who is an AFL fan, runs through a magical turnstile that takes him to OuterWorld.  There he must decide which of the 16 mascots to team up with in order to compete against the remaining mascots and win team spirit.

Intended Audience:

Mascot Manor is intended for general audiences; although, I would only recommend this video game to kids and possibly pre-teens.  The environments are painted colorfully and the audio is constantly in a happy jingle.  Teens and older may find the graphics lacking in pizzazz and aggressiveness.

Gameplay:

The gameplay is straightforward.  You have a button to jump, one to punch, one to cycle through special abilities, and another to activate them.  As you defeat mascots, you gain their special abilities and if you already own that special ability, you willgain the gold version of that special ability which is a stronger version.  To get to the mascot fights, you have to go through two levels:  one being an introductory level which tends to be fairly short, and a second which usually has more girth to it.  The third level houses the mascot of the world you are in.

Each level in OuterWorld provides you with plenty of exploration.  You can:  kill enemies, collect trophies and gems for money which can be used for buying AFL cards, find healthy food and energy drinks to refresh you, and find AFL cards.  All of these collectables can be viewed at the end of each level to see how well you explored.  Although you do not gain anything from complete clearing a level, this is a handy way of figuring out if there are AFL cards to collect that you may have missed.

Boss fights have a growing difficulty curve, which was surprisingly pleasant.  The first mascot you fight will have one health bar and you gain its special ability after a quick beat down.  No powers are even required for the first fight.  After the first mascot fight, the mascot bosses will start to get more health bars and eventually they will summon smaller enemies to help them out in defeating you.  Towards the end I was cornered into using all of my energy and searching for every bit of healthy food and energy drinks, which is great.  By the last mascot you should be comfortable enough with your fight style that the last mascot fight is essentially an endurance test.

Unfortunately you are able to choose the order in which you fight the mascots.  I say this is unfortunate, because unless you have played the game, you will not know what order you should beat the mascots in based on their special abilities.  This kind of foresight may be absent in the audience that will experience the game, thus the person playing might unfortunately leave a mascot with a very strong special ability as the last fight.  This is a minor, possible inconvenience.  I played through in the order that the worlds were listed, which I believe is not the easiest order of mascots to fight, but a decently tough mix.

The plus side to the level selection is avoiding frustration.  Wicked Witch Software did a decent job in padding the video game to avoid frustration from their players in a couple of ways.  You are given the choice to come back to more challenging areas later and most instant kill hazards are marked by floating skulls that move in and out of the hazard, like a pool of water.

Unfortunately the video game can be as unfair as it is safe.  Falling into a pool of hazardous water or being flung off a platform usually means you die instantly.  Once you lose all of your health or enter one of these major hazards, you are transported back to the beginning of that level.  That means the longer levels and the levels that are difficult to traverse you must complete in one go without dyeing.  Even worse you lose all of the gems and cards you had found in that level.  This means players who are keen explorers may lose all of their money and cards from that level by a mistaken step into a body of water, perhaps killing 20+ minutes of exploration.  I would have liked to see checkpoints, but at the very least you should not lose your findings.  If anything the children playing the video game may get too frustrated to continue.

Beyond the main story there are a few mini games to unlock and an AFL mini game available immediately.  After beating the main story, these mini games are a good way to unwind before you attempt to go back and find more cards or get more money in OuterWorld.  To unlock all of the mini games you have to find many cards and complete the main story which means you have to beat every level at least once.

Replay Value:

There are 16 mascots available as possible character choices, but it boils down to which character you think looks the coolest.  Each mascot can learn all the special abilities eventually, so no mascot has a leg up or a special ability that is exclusive to that mascot.  The only difference is what special ability you start with, but that quickly dissolves as you beat mascots with special abilities you want.  In other words there is little point in starting a new game, rather you start one and try to get 100% team spirit and collect all the cards.

Collecting all the hundreds of AFL cards is nothing easy.  Some are hidden in crevices and boxes while others drop out of enemies you defeat; so obtaining the common cards is challenging while collecting every single rare card will take quite some time.  This encourages players to trade cards of duplicates they have found or bought in the card shop.

Conclusion:

Mascot Manor is a splendid general action and exploration video game for Nintendo DS users.  There are some pitfalls in gameplay that can lead to frustration, but if the players can avoid the major hazards while exploring, they should be well rewarded.  Unfortunately this is not a game that appeals to everyone.  Since the gameplay is over-simplistic and lacking in depth, players will probably beat this in a day or so if they are not AFL fans.  However, kids who are AFL fans should find this game worthwhile, as there are plenty of AFL cards to collect and explore in order to do so.

Score:  7

Reviewed by Joseph A. Till

This entry was posted on Thursday, July 15th, 2010 at 6:17 pm and is filed under Reviews. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.