Biker Mice From Mars (Nintendo DS) Review

If you've never heard of the Biker Mice from Mars you are one of the lucky ones. It was essentially one of the many crap cartoons that followed in the wake of the quite watchable and enjoyable Teenage Mutant Hero Turtles. No, that is not a typo, we didn't get to have ninja turtles in the UK we had hero turtles...anyway, back to the cruddier anthropomorphic characters of our featured game. We meet our rodent heroes on their home planet of Mars as an army of alien cats have besieged their fortress, so it's up to you to stop them as well as complete some other nonsensical story elements by riding a bike and beating up bad guys in level after level of repetitive, boring action.

Now I'm not sure if it's just nostalgia setting in again, but I remember 16-bit games looking better than this – okay, I know that the Biker Mice from Mars is using fancy polygon based graphics from 3D Playstation and N64 games, but this is a 2D brawler on a small screen. Graphics like that are wasted, they lack the definition and character of 2D sprites, which also considering that this is based off of a kids cartoon would have been far more appropriate and a far greater improvement. The audio is slightly worse: the technical quality is good but the music is crud and the odd “Biker Mice from Mars” repeated every minute or so isn't increasing my love for the audio, and them using the same sound affect for the majority of the enemies is just plain annoying.

Let's get onto the fun stuff, or more appropriately the lacking in fun-stuff. The vast majority of the game plays as a side scrolling brawler where you get to jump a bit and it's easy to get ratted off by the amount of money you spend on the game (and no that wasn't a pun, I'm just not allowed to use the F or P words in a review). One of my first Mega Drive games was Streets Of Rage and you could move in eight directions in that game; Biker Mice from Mars doesn't even allow you to aim up when you get hold of a laser gun, which is even more annoying when a good few of the bad guys can fly. For Pete's sake, you can't even do a ducking punch or kick, you instantly stand back up and the whole point is defeated. Oh and the motorcycle levels aren't fun either because the bikes handle awfully, nothing else needs to be said about it. If you can't control the character you can't enjoy the game.

What we are left with is a cheaply made game being sold for more than it should be in an era that has moved away from linear brawlers whose only attempts at increasing difficulty is to throw progressively higher numbers of the same enemy at you until the odds are so against you you are bound to lose all your energy. That's another thing, there are no lives or continues, you die and you just restart that level from the last checkpoint, where's the challenge in that? What's the point in playing this game? There isn't any and there are far better games than this on the market, so just avoid this like the plague.