Thoughts:
As much as I want to say that Double Trouble has a lot of really awesome and cool ideas; I’m more inclined to say its a very average game. In the other Viewtiful Joe games, the games were far more exciting and challenging because the A.I and puzzles were better. While at times they were also annoying to play against or hard to understand because of the unclear directions for puzzles sometimes, they at least give some memorable moments and challenge that is need in this day and age of gaming. The best way to really describe the combat in this game is that its a slightly better beat’em up style game, which maybe fine for some people, but it certainly isn’t that great for Viewtiful Joe. Viewtiful Joe really differs itself as a game because the way you can use Joe’s powers to spice up the combat or use to your advantage to get a couple more hits in. Double Trouble however doesn’t seem to have a lot of enemies that actually need Joe’s powers to take down however and a lot of the game can simply be played by button mashing and simple jump avoiding. That’s not how Viewtiful Joe is supposed to be, and certainly made the games bosses suffer more for it despite having some pretty cool designs. Aside from slow, Joe’s powers this time really aren’t as responsive as I’d like them to be. Shaking, a new mechanic where you press one of the shoulder buttons to make Joe stop so you can start scratching the screen to cause things to get loose, is very unresponsive at times. Often when trying to shake an item on screen you usually hit it once or twice then suddenly make the shaking power stop in the midst of your action, usually by activating a different power, causing you to start the process all over again. Another action that worked much like close up from the older Viewtiful games was here too, but the way it actually worked seemed a bit counter intuitive to the whole control scheme. In order to close up on Joe or something Joe needed to touch you had to move your stylus or thumb vertically up then in order to exit said mode you move your stylus or thumb vertically down. While it certainly seems simple enough, when actually playing the game at a fair pace it became quite a hassle to active and deactivate, usually meaning that you just have to waste your Viewtiful meter. Finally the split mechanic is the only touch screen power that actively worked for me constantly and was overall impressive to use for puzzles. Often when getting stuck I just had to split screen somewhere and the problem would be solved. It wasn’t used in combat very often though, so perhaps that’s why I found it easier to use as I wasn’t panicking over pace.
Double Trouble’s story however was fairly interesting compared to the past two Viewtiful games, but not nearly as fun as the past two were either. Its an odd mix of good idea, bad presentation. Unlike the past games, Double Trouble has little voice acting and movement during the cutscenes, although its more than likely due to the DS hardware. Either way, a lot of the life that Joe and his friends have seem to be fairly out of it without voice acting or movement. While I do think that a lot of ideas in Double Trouble are great, what basically it boils down to is that it doesn’t have much of a life to it, and this is the exact problem with the story as well. Although I will say Double Trouble does end on a fairly good note compared to the rest of the game. The music and soundeffects are also there, but nothing really new or interesting to set it apart from the rest of the series. Overall Double Trouble just kinda feels like an experiment from Capcom rather than an actual attempt on a Viewtiful joe game, but with a bit more polish on it I think it could actually be fairly good like the rest of the series. But for now, Double Trouble is the bottom of the totem pole in viewtifulness.
Final Thoughts:
Double Trouble sets itself apart from other Viewtiful Joe games by having a lot more interesting powers and abilities to use via the touch screen however in turn it lost a lot of its life and style that the other two games present itself so well in. When it comes down to it, Double Trouble feels more like a half-hearted experiment of what could have been a good game, but just plays too much with the concepts rather than fixes the gears to really make them work. Thus it made what could have been a fun experience rather average with a lot of the enemies and items being rather dull or too easy to actually beat
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