The Simpsons' franchise is a highly successful one, having spawned a lot of commercial gain for its owners and fame for its creator. Sure enough, this means that there are more than a few parties out to profit from its popularity in whatever manner possible.
One of the devices used in such profiteering is making video games based on the Simpsons, or at least merely having their appearances in such games but with little else. Escape From Camp Deadly is one such game.
This game is loosely based on the episode that concerned Lisa's and Bart's time in the infamous Kamp Krusty. In this spin-off story, their parents have again dumped them in a summer camp whose background and conditions that their parents did not check out thoroughly, despite its very ominous name.
The game also has a very conveniently conceived villain: the arch-boss of Camp Deadly is yet another relative of the recurring antagonist in the franchise, Mr. Burns. Reminiscent of the notorious elder Burns, this younger one has created an overtly harrowing, money-swilling hell-hole of a summer camp that no decent parent would have suspected to be one, inexplicably enough.
As expected, Bart and Lisa despised the camp just a few short, terrible moments later after stepping into it. Soon enough, they hatch a plan to escape from the camp. Lisa, being (allegedly) the more pacifist of the two, sought to sneak around the camp to smuggle or steal items for Bart, the more confrontational sibling, to use against the dangers that face them. Bart starts out with, of all initial tier weapons to have been designed, spit-wads.
Understandably, his spit-wads do nothing substantial against enemies; they just stun them, or more precisely, freeze the animation of their models. Of course, it may just be an issue of lazy expediency in the graphical design of the game (more on this later). Soon thereafter, Bart graduates to using boomerangs, which are usually supplied by Lisa in batches. Bart can throw one of these at a time and can retrieve it if it has been deflected by enemies or comes flying back on their return trajectory. While it is still in the screen, Bart can still resort to launching spit-wads, which is convenient while waiting for the boomerang to return. (The boomerang can still fly off the screen if not retrieved on its return trajectory or after being deflected.)
It would not take long for the player to realize that spamming boomerangs is a very easy way to get rid of incoming enemy waves, which are plentiful. Enemies can come from every edge of the screen other than the one that forms the ground (generally speaking, that is; enemies can still pop up from beneath). Deftly managing the launching and retrieving of boomerangs to defeat these waves would have been fun, if it was not for the small screen, which can get filled by enemies very quickly (more details on this later).
While there are many levels in the game with different themes, most of them play very similarly with each other. Hazards and platforms populate levels, often in ridiculous ways (such as tree branches that extend very, very far out of the screen), with (many) locations within said levels having triggers for enemy waves. Once the player realizes the presence of these triggers - and the fact that the levels do not have timers - the player would soon learn to nudge Bart slowly along the screen, triggering one or two waves only at a time to be defeated with boomerang and spit-wad spams. This is an efficient way to complete the levels, but one that this reviewer hardly finds satisfying.
The early levels are filled with enemies and require Bart to collect flags to advance. Some flags are situated very, very close to instant-incapacitation hazards, which can be frustrating. The later levels simply reduce the number of stable platforms that Bart can stand on and increase the number of inconveniently placed enemies, a hit from which often results in Bart plummeting to his death. In fact, most of the later levels have so many instant-incapacitation hazards that any extra hit-points that the player has collected are but for naught.
The only levels that are somewhat satisfactorily entertaining are the mess halls. In these levels, Bart has his boomerangs confiscated and his spit-wads strictly forbidden. Bart has to collect a whole bunch of unsavory food items and use them as projectiles against other camp attendants, who are eager to engage in fisticuffs despite posters warning against any misfeasance. In these sequences, the player gets to see how devastating tofu burgers and broccoli can be when used as weapons. Bart characteristically discards whatever "ammunition" that he had left into dustbins for additional hit-points at the end of every stretch of the mess hall.
If players would like to replay this game, these are the levels that would make the experience (only) a bit more worthwhile.
The characters in the game, be they Bart Simpson or his enemies, have very, very few frames of animation. Merely the fact that Bart appears to be looking at the player almost all the time and that Lisa has next to no other frame of animation other than just standing there looking towards either side of the screen suggests that the game developers had spent very little effort in the animation department.
Regular enemies are even worse. The very early ones consist of only a single type: a dude with sunglasses, dark clothes and a tweed cap. They only have couple of actual animations, and often their AI merely consists of passing through the screen and throwing a punch or a projectile at Bart when he happens to be conveniently in the way.
The bosses are only slightly more interesting to fight. They include the bullies of Camp Deadly, who have carved out their own fiefdom. Interestingly, dealing with them is an optional matter, as the player can choose the alternative of navigating through treacherous platforming sequences instead of confronting them. The bullies are generally impossible to defeat from the front, as they deflect boomerangs easily. However, there are tricks to quickly dispose of them. Successfully doing so rewards the player with extra hit-points and costumes that act like temporary power-ups for Bart, which will be very handy in the next section. However, these costumes prevent the use of spit-wads and boomerangs, and more importantly are completely optional.
Fighting all of the above-mentioned enemies would have been easier if the in-game models are not so large compared to the rest of the screen. As such, enemies that appear on-screen often happen to be just several paces away from Bart, which is not a good thing as Bart's own model is also just as huge and thus easy to receive any smacking. This is particularly a bother when the player attempts to retrieve loot drops from freshly defeated enemies; an enemy may just be running across the loot drop, causing the player to stay away and watch the loot drop float out of the screen.
Speaking of defeated enemies, the game does a terrible job of removing them from the screen. Most regular enemies appear to have their models sheared away like what happens upon yanking away a Jenga block from a stack. Worse, their models may just pixel-late and disintegrate on the spot, as if Bart's weapons destroys their very existence. At best, their models just get turned upside down and they just float downwards out of the screen.
As a GameBoy game, its graphics merely look barely decent. As mentioned earlier, the models have terrible animation, but they do conform to Matt Groening's design somewhat. However, it has to be pointed that the game does a terrible job at generating the eyes of characters; if they have any, they are inexplicably dark-colored. In fact, the shading of the models and backgrounds are all over the place. Dark skies, awkwardly contrasting luminance of ceilings and floors and other oddities mar the visuals of this game, but at least they provide very strong contrasts, especially between moving models and the background.
The sound department of this game is perhaps the better half of its presentation, though it is still flawed. The music in this game is none other than the famous soundtracks of the franchise strained through 8-bit filters, but it is still quite catchy to listen to (if only to know how the soundtracks would sound like when they are in 8-bit). Sound effects that accompany attacks that Bart and enemies make are satisfactory in their function of indicating that attacks have been launched. There are also voice-overs for Bart and Lisa that are triggered when they are harmed, but they have been strained so hard through 8-bit filters such that they are next to inaudible and thus feel tacked on.
To summarize this review, Escape From Camp Deadly is not a very remarkable game. It has only a few moments where The Simpsons' franchise's signature humour comes into play and while it does have functional gameplay, its presentation is lackluster.