When I picked up a copy of Freaky Flyers, I expected, well, a little freak. You know, something wild, outlandish, exciting. Sadly, this was not to be. Flyers turns out to be little more than a Mario Kart clone, without the smooth gameplay or the portly plumber.
Freaky Flyers
Platforms: Sony Playstation 2, Nintendo Gamecube, Microsoft Xbox
Developer: Midway
Publisher: Midway
The concept is solid: take to the sky as one of the two dozen characters available, decimate anything that moves and cross the finish line to glorious victory.
Each character has their own storyline, which plays out in videos between stages. Your character also takes on the task of finding hidden goals throughout the giving you power-ups, turbo boosts, and the like. Bonus stages are scattered about, which have you fulfilling such tasks as protecting a base or simply racing against time. And if you have a few controllers lying around, friends can join in for a little multiplayer action as well.
Now if you've been reading carefully, you'll notice that Flyers does nothing that you haven't seen before. Furthermore, it does most of them rather poorly.
Gameplay suffers, as this game rejects the concept of strategy. Most races consist of hitting the gas, laying on your machine gun, and occasional yawning. Power-ups, whose diversity ranges from "missile" to "five missiles", are unnecessary, as hte machine gun is more powerful than anything you'll find on the course.
Completing the hidden goals are difficult, as you don't know what they are until the race is over when a little screen pops up and tells you what you should have be doing for the past five minutes. Not that it would matter because completing the goals would only provide more useless power-ups.
Level design is uninspired, as you fly through the same Ice, City, and Desert stages you've played in better games. Having to pull three laps around each of them doesn't help matters either.
The saving grace of this title is the graphics, which look surprisingly smooth coming out of a PS2. Though the levels aren't very fun to fly through, they look damn beautiful, and every character has a sharp, cartoonish look I haven't seen in any game prior. Cutscenes are no different, each one looking and feeling like its own episode of Looney Tunes.
Except without the humor.
A lot of time was spent putting together multiple cutscenes for each character, but the characters themselves, and the missions they've been placed on, all smack of lame writing. Many of the gags are horribly unfunny and are repeated far too often. This, along with midi-quality music, will have you playing the game on mute, if at all.
Unfortunately, to view the cutscenes at all, you'll have to go back and complete the same races you've already done. What's more, each character plays exactly the same, with no difference in power, speed, or defense. Completing the same level with the same vehicle requires a level of patience on par with the likes of Gandhi, and ultimately isn't worth it.
With great graphics and little more, Freaky Flyers is a good concept poorly executed. Get your freak on elsewhere.
Mat Montgomery is a video game reporter for the Web Devil. You can reach him at mathew.montgomery@asu.edu.
