User Rating: 8.1 | Voodoo Vince XBOX
This is a good game that should have been great. Worth a purchase but you will shake your head at how good it COULD have been. First off, the premise of the game is great. A voodoo doll set loose on a very messed-up New Orleans area. A very cool idea and the type of out of the box thinking that would make a lot more games a lot more interesting. The best thing about this game is the sound. The music is unbelievably good. In fact, this is one of the rare games that argues for a separate release of the soundtrack. The music is jazzy and fits the mood of this game like a glove. Its a nice touch. The voice acting is excellent too. Vince, Cosmo and the rest of the cast are well-chosen and the lines are well-delivered. The writing is crisp, funny and memorable. These are characters you are going to enjoy spending time with. The graphics are a mixed bag. Some environments look really good--especially in the early part of the game. Some are not so hot. Vince himself is pretty cool-looking for a voodoo doll, but some of the other characters are a little too blocky. Gameplay itself can be frustrating and unforgiving at points--so frustrating I nearly had to stop playing at certain points where I simply did not think I could get past the jump in question. Some of the jumps require a level of precision that can be very hard to achieve. And the game would have been advised to choose a system of "lives" similar to the system Oddworld for the XBox used. Otherwise it is 3 and out...and that gets old when the jumps are so difficult. Yes, you can easily "stock up" on lives to give you more chances at the difficult points, but this is annoying and time-consuming make-work and could have been programmed much more efficiently. But while there are moments of frustration, the characters, writing and music are so good, you really have to give it a try. It's fun. For a while, anyway.
