Go! Go! Hypergrind Review

Intuitively designed, and visually distinctive, Go! Go! Hypergrind is a pretty interesting game all around. Brought to you by Atlus development house Poponchi, Go! Go! Hypergrind is a skateboarding game based on character designs and animations from Spumco--the animation company fronted by John Kricfalusi--who created such animation cult classics as The Ren & Stimpy Show and the Cartoon Network's The Ripping Friends. While the idea of a skateboarding game based on this style of juvenile gross-out humor may initially seem highly out of place, Go! Go! Hypergrind actually works shockingly well and pans out to be an engaging, if simplistic, skateboarding experience with some legitimately amusing gags and great presentational aspects.

Go! Go! Hypergrind features character designs from the creators of The Ren & Stimpy Show

Go! Go! Hypergrind's story and premise is comparable to the plot of the classic Robert Zemeckis film Who Framed Roger Rabbit, but it comes with a decidedly more bizarre spin on the concept. The idea the game puts forth is that animation, in all its forms, is essentially broken up into two categories. There's "real-world" animation, which is created in the traditional way that we know, where animators draw and use computers to animate created characters. The other way involves animated actors from a place called the "Toon World," where cartoon "actors" act out the scripts provided by animation houses. In the game, Go! Go! Hypergrind is actually a new TV show currently in development by Spumco, and the various skaters are cartoon actors trying to get a shot at the leading role in the show.

There are 12 different available skaters in Go! Go! Hypergrind, each with his or her own unique look and design. Some of the more memorable characters include Decker, an "extreme" wolf with sagging jeans and an attitude; Mr. Smith, an irritable monkey with an adorable tuxedo jacket and miniature top hat; Piggy Sue, a bikini-clad oinker with a bit of a weight problem; Sally, a cute little girl who also happens to be a mummy/witch; and the Johnson Bros., a goofy pair with long noses who are stacked on top of one another and share the same sweater. The character designs are very cool and are most definitely representative of the work of Spumco. Each character also has his or her own strengths and weaknesses in the categories of air, ollie, rail, lip, manual, and reaction. Stats are measured on a 1-to-10 point scale. Stat balance doesn't really exist between skaters, and many characters range from being decidedly underpowered to heavily overpowered. However, despite the stat levels, the handling for each of them doesn't feel especially different, so, once you've mastered the basic mechanics of the game, you'll be able to perform just fine with any available skater.

When it comes to the actual skating in Go! Go! Hypergrind, anyone who's played practically any other skateboarding game should be able to pick up the basic skating mechanics with relative ease. Trick categories are broken up into air, flip, grind, manual, and lip tricks. Basic tricks are performed by pressing a direction on the analog stick, along with the appropriate trick button when in the proper situation for a trick. So, for example, when you're in the air, all you need to do is press up and hit the air trick button, and you'll perform one of your skater's air tricks. Every skater also has his or her own list of unique, special tricks, which are performed essentially the same way. The only real difference with special tricks is that they use a character-specific type of animation. For instance, you might see Sally riding a broomstick across a rail during a grind, or you may see the Johnson Bros. doing a goofy dance at the top of a ramp during a lip trick. Special tricks also tend to net you more points, but they take a little longer to execute, so you'll need to time them a little more carefully.

Go! Go! Hypergrind also features an interesting type of trick that plays heavily to the game's cartoon-based image. Each environment in the game contains a host of different gags that can be used by pressing the X button at the proper time. Gag types range from saw blades that decapitate your skater to swinging doors and mechanized flattening devices that fold you up like an accordion. There are also flaming garbage cans that can set you ablaze, and there are even giant plants that will gobble you whole. Rather than count them as simple tricks by themselves, however, executing one of these special gags puts you into a special state that multiplies your score for each trick you perform while in this state. This allows you to link all your tricks (while in this state), thus creating one big combo. Executing these gags is just as simple as any of the other tricks in the game, but it does require some precise timing, which is similar to the special tricks.

The game's skateboarding mechanics are very simple but still manage to be pretty fun.

These gag tricks are made even better by the excellent and entertaining level design found in Go! Go! Hypergrind. There are eight levels in all to be found in the game, each one modeled after a supposed cartoon movie set. Every stage is chock-full of the usual ramps, rails, and jumps, in addition to the aforementioned gags and hazards. What really makes each level so cool, however, is how you have the ability to string together many of these gags into surprisingly long combinations, which you can use to access secret or otherwise hard-to-reach sections. For example, on the game's "jungle" level, simply skating into a campfire will provide the appropriate fire effect. Then, skating into a nearby pack of dynamite will send you flying into the air and toward a cannon. Hit the X button there, and you'll be sent flying even farther through the air toward a volcano. Hit the X button there, and you'll be sucked into the volcano. Then you'll be spat out in an entirely different direction, and so on and so forth. Not all of these types of combinations are as lengthy as this example, but there's plenty of cool stuff to find in each stage.