Prophecies have foretold of an anti-christ made of pure evil that will single-handedly lead the world into Armageddon. While this leader will seem innocent at first, he won’t be able to keep his evil intentions secret for long and will send his armies out into the world, ravaging all in their path.
Data Design interactive in its current form came into being in 1999, providing innocent and casual games at a bargain bin price. 2005 saw their biggest franchises released onto the PS2 consisting of lame as shit characters such as Ninjabread Man and Billy the Wizard. In 2007, Data Design Interactive ported and released Anubis II, Ninjabread Man, and Billy the Wizard to the Wii…all within three days of each other. Strange coincidence or uncanny prophecy fulfillment?
It’s been two years since I covered Ninjabread Man, and damned if I wasn’t just starting to get that foul taste out of my mouth when now I find myself with Anubis II, the first of this veritable “three horsemen of the apocalypse” that DDI saw fit to resurrect from their PS2 barrel of IP swill. While it was originally released for the PS2 in Europe, Anubis II never saw release in the States thanks in part to some angelic QA guy at Sony with a coffee stained shirt that’s two sizes too small for him. His efforts were in vain as Nintendo saw that it was perfectly fine to release a game that was ugly as nails and wrought with bugs for their oversized ipod and charging people $20 for it.
The first thing you’ll notice when you start up Anubis II is that it looks just like Ninjabread Man down to the HUD, level design, music, and the constant fucking buzz of bees everywhere. This cookie cutter approach (lolcookiecutterlol) should be the first inclination that Data Design Interactive is a prostitute of game design. They don’t want a fulfilling relationship, they just want to fuck you and take your money. End of story.
Known officially as “Anubis the second”, Anubis II isn’t a sequel to anything, thank god. So what premise do we have for making an Egyptian god of death and judgment jump onto a bunch of platforms? Well, there’s some thin story about a spirit named Mumm'hotep that has plunged Egypt into darkness and Anubis has been summoned to put a stop to him. If ol’ Mumm'hotep did anything to Egypt, he obviously turned its arid, sprawling topography into an incoherent gauntlet of rooms and caves with floors coated with EZ-Glide.
What Anubis II does have is a bastard of a camera that is only rivaled by the one seen in Ninjabread Man. Oh right, it’s the same damn thing. It’ll fly out of control in mid-jump, it’ll get stuck in the floor, it’ll bump off of walls, hell, it would turn flips if it could. The camera is your one true, and greatest enemy notwithstanding the levels that are cobbled together and untested in such a way that you never know if your next jump will bring you to safety or into the shit-yellow abyss that awaits you outside of the level. When you’re not fearing for your near-infinite amount of lives, you’ll be reduced to mindlessly jumping from platform to platform in what can only be called “Baby’s first dialed-in platform game”.
Much like Ninjabread Man before it, Anubis II tacks on Wii motion controls with unparalleled shamelessness. When you start the game, you’re taken through the same tutorial that you saw in Ninjabread Man. Here, you’ll learn to jump by shaking the nunchuk before you eventually give up and realize that you can jump just by pressing the Z button. You can also shoot fireballs by pressing the B button and swing your staff by swinging the Wii remote. There are also some bombs that you can throw by holding down A and “throwing” the remote, but they don’t do anything to the enemies they hit other than pissing them off and moving them closer to you. You can go through the entire game without them anyways. The manual actually gives the wrong instructions on throwing bombs too – goes to show that they not only release their two year old games untested, they also suck at proofreading.
Also much like Ninjabread Man, the game’s five types of enemies will rarely find themselves on the wrong end of Anubis’s staff seeing as it’s the most useless thing this side of decorative towels…and even then, those will occasionally impress shallow people with an eye for flair. You’ll be lucky to get two consecutive swings in, since the motion controls are near nonexistent. The end result is madly swinging the remote while Anubis stares off, wall-eyed and pondering the universe while the pissed off enemy charges and hits you. Every damn time, no matter how hard you will want to try, it will happen. When you take damage, you’ll be invincible for a few seconds, but unable to use your staff in retaliation. Thankfully, enemies are as stupid as bricks and you can usually recover by running a few feet away where they’ll give up the chase, turn around, and plop back down into their original spot to wait for you to run up and hit them again.
But why go to the trouble of using the stupid fucking staff anyways? The always exploitable fireballs you have will take care of anything from a distance. Pressing B will bring up a manual aiming crosshair that will turn red and lock onto anything within 200 feet of you. Better yet, fireballs will home in on whatever you’re locked onto. This makes combat, the only thing that could have made this game even remotely playable, nothing more than an optional annoyance. Just run, jump, press B, take aim, shoot, repeat, repeat, repeat, REPEAT.
There are a few bonus levels that try to break up the action, but rarely last more than thirty seconds. Then again, would you really want bragging rights on your Anubis II high score anyways? You’re tasked with collecting what look like a bunch of bugs while bugs of the evil variety chase you down. You can try to coerce them into pits or lava pools, but you usually end up hurting yourself in the process. Bonus levels end up like those stupid cash grab games where you’re in a tube of flying money. Grab as much as you can, but you’ll always fail in the end. If you even feel like playing the game time and time again, you can also try the “artefact” hunt (they used the uncommon spelling...weird.) or the treasure grab mode where in addition to opening the portal at the end of the stage, you have 600 stupid looking trinkets to pick up too.
Anubis II, like its DDI cohorts, are exactly the kind of garbage that are choking the shelves with actual good games for the Wii. It’s shovelware in its truest form from a company that specializes in it. It would be one thing if it were a short and sweet experience, but there’s nothing sweet about this. It’s a lame character with a lame premise and an ultimately forgettable experience from start to end. I should know, I’ve played through this damn thing four times now and have absolutely nothing to show for it. DDI will always be a modern day Active Enterprises in my mind with their pipe dreams of bringing lovable mascots to the masses via half-baked games. Until then, I eagerly await Ninjabread Man 2.
Since 2007, Gamescrap has brought you the the worst video games, game commercials, game merchandise, and gaming moments ever to grace the industry. No matter if it's a beloved classic or the next hot thing, no bad game is safe from the horrors of the Gamescrap heap.
Since 2007, Gamescrap has brought you the the worst video games, game commercials, game merchandise, and gaming moments ever to grace the industry. No matter if it's a beloved classic or the next hot thing, no bad game is safe from the horrors of the Gamescrap heap.