After five years of the underground sci-fi series Futurama graced the FOX Sunday lineup, the higher ups pulled the plug on the series, leaving seventy-two episodes of comedy gold. Months later, the Futurama saga continues with the videogame of the same name. So, does the game stack up to the show? As a game, not at all; from a gameplay perspective, Futurama is as tedious and boring as it is unpolished, providing a few sparse hours of boring shoot em’ up environments and little else. However, if you’re a rabid fan of the show and crave new Futurama material, the game’s excellent and hilarious plotlines and dialogue (written by the masterminds who penned the show’s scripts) feels like a lost episode of Futurama, and if you can tolerate the game’s many annoying shortcomings, you’ll find that Futurama’s story is one worth listening to. Futurama kicks off with the Professor selling the Planet Express delivery service, thanks to some poor business decisions, to the tyrannical Mom Corporation. Unfortunately, with her acquisition of the company, Mom now owns fifty-one percent of Earth, making her overlord of the planet and, in turn, filling the streets with her dangerous killbots in an attempt to police the human race; never a good thing, to be sure. And so the story begins with Fry and the others at Planet Express trying to right the wrongs and bring Earth back to normal. Throughout the course of the game, you’ll play as series stars Fry, Bender, and Leela, as well as the office oddball Doctor Zoidberg, though besides appearance, all of these characters play identical, which is rather disappointing. You’ll occasionally have some less-than-interesting fetch and grab tasks that require you to hop around all sorts of environments, collecting things and bringing them back to a central location, the vast majority of your time is spent blasting things into oblivion with a variety of different stock weapons, albeit with a futuristic twist (the shotgun will fire a buckshot of energy blasts, for example). You’ll move throughout the sewer system, the ruins of Old New York, the tattered killbots infested streets of New New York, and more, though “tedium” can be used to describe the gameplay for each. A bunch of generic and boring enemies charge at you, you target them, you mash the shoot button, and they fall down. That’s about as deep as Futurama ever becomes, and the game can’t even execute this simple concept right. For starters, the game uses an auto-target system that automatically lines up your shots if you hold down the right trigger. In theory, this would work fine, but it’s a disaster in practice; the lock-on will never target what you want it to. If there are three enemies coming at you, the reticule will almost always target the farthest away from you, making the otherwise effortless battles annoying. Also, any breakable objects will also be part of the targeting, so if you enter a room full of crates (which is a fairly regular thing), prepare to shoot a lot of boxes before you can start contending with your enemies. A manual aim function is available, but it’s pretty sluggish and renders you immobile while you use it. Prepare for a lot of frustration as you slog through these shooting sequences, especially if you’re trying to find all the hidden Nibblers spread out throughout each level. Most of these shooter levels also have some light jumping or switch pulling puzzles in them, and some of the sequences stand on their own without any resistance associated with them. The jumping in Futurama can be a little odd sometimes – the distance that your character jumps feels a little irregular and, as a result, will lead to loads of “fall into the bottomless pit” types of deaths that will likely try your patience, though you’ll probably gain a good cache of extra lives during the game and frequent checkpoints ensure that you never start too far away from where you last perished. These sequences, while more frustrating than the shooting sequences, are at least more interesting, though their by no means wholly enjoyable. Graphically, Futurama does a surprisingly good job of translating the series’ characters into 3D, making them look almost identical, though each of the characters does look a little disagreeable at certain angles (especially Fry). They all animate well, too. The environments have a tendency to be a little tedious in their look but nonetheless can look pretty good most of the time, thanks to some classic Futurama style complete with a bunch of ads that series’ neophytes will recognize from the show. The game can occasionally slow down, but even with those caveats, Futurama is a fairly good-looking game overall. The game’s best suit is its audio. Though the weapon sounds are pretty muffled, everything else is top-notch. Christopher Tyng, the composer from the series, has composed all of the music here, and it all sounds fantastic, sounding like it could be placed in any episode of the show. The voice acting is what really takes the cake, though – Billy West, John Di Maggio and Katey Segal all reprise their roles in the videogame, and they all turn in incredible performances and deliver a slew of laugh-out-loud moments and constantly reference happenings from the TV show. Futurama’s audio is the better of the two facets of presentation. Overall, if you’re both an extremely patient gamer and a rabid Futurama fan, renting the game may be a good idea solely to hear the jokes that it tells along that way. If you don’t fall into those categories, Futurama is not a game worth exploring. There are a lot of worse choices than Futurama if you want a competent action game, but there are also a lot of better ones.
Futurama is a poorly put together game that only offers moments of nostalgia to avid fans of the show. The Gameplay featured in Futurama the game is atrocious. Your control over your character’s running ability is decent... Read Full Review
If there was a prize for the funniest game ever, Futurama would win it. The game script is written by a writer for Futurama, all the voice cast are there, and some neat little jokes are put in that fans of the show will ... Read Full Review
