Alex Hirsch. He was a writer and storyboard artist on the Cartoon Network original The Marvelous Misadventires of Flapjack, which was moderately successful but was cancelled with 46 episodes in August of 2010. Hirsch then went onto co-developing Disney’s Fish Hooks, which turned into an even larger success, now ending its second season and Fish Hooks has its third already in production. So, because of these successes Disney allowed Alex to be the creative lead on his own animated series, which soon became Gravity Falls.

Gravity Falls was released on June 15, 2012 to well deserved praise for its fantastic visual flare, its very mature yet fun for all the family writing, and its ever alluring mystery. In the short period that it has been on the airs it has been placed alongside shows like Adventure Time or Regular Show as examples of current shows that appeal to all ages and do it without having to dumb down its content.

But let’s talk gaming now since shows like Adventure Time, and Regular Show (even MAD) are getting their own games the popular Gravity Falls definitely deserved time in the gaming spotlight. It’s first step being the very well written and animated episode “Fight Fighters.” In this episode, Robbie (the resident asshole of the show) challenges Dipper in a fight, and while hiding out at the arcade Dipper finds a secret move etched into his game “Fight Fighters.” After performing the code his chosen character Rumble McSkirmish comes to life in glorious pixel art quality and becomes Dipper’s bodyguard. However McSkirmish instead of just beating Robbie decides to kill him so Dipper manages to outsmart McSkirmish into giving him a game over. Fight Fighters is one of my favorite episodes and I was happy to see that the game I’m looking at today, Rumble’s Revenge, is a sequel to that episode.

The story goes that, Mabel and Dipper, while playing at the arcade are sucked into their video game by their past foe, Rumble McSkirmish and as the title states he’s back for revenge against the two siblings. He challenges them to pass his levels of references of old episodes of Gravity Falls to take him on and escape. In total there are four levels that visit the four prominent locations in Gravity falls; the forest (basically The Mystery Shack tutorial area), the caves, the deep forest, and finally the city.

The controls of the game are simple. At the start of the game you choose from the two pine twins; Mabel, the more stronger but slower character, and Dipper, who’s extremely fast but quite fitting to the show is as weak as a twig. After a great majority obviously chooses Mabel, the movement controls are thus, the arrow keys move Mabel, ‘x’ is your basic attack/pick up item button, ‘c’ is your jump, and the ‘space’ bar is your special attack. To perform the special attack you firstly beat the crud out of the enemies to make the blue gauge at the top left corner of the screen fill and depending on the character you can release either Aoshima or the Multibear.

The controls flow and function like any typical side scrolling beat ‘em up. Beat all the gnomes, manotaurs, and skull eyeball things until you are permitted to move forward. The gameplay is very button mashy, which for a web based side scroller, is a lot of fun but there are two things that always bug me about it. The first problem being picking up weapons.

Now weapons in this game have an odd sort of upgrading system. Let’s go trhough a scenario, there are two manotaurs on one side of me and on the other and in the middle I find Grunkle Stan’s cane and right beside there happens to be a broom. So from both sides the manotaurs are beating me to a pulp and what am I doing I’m swapping out the cane for the broom and then swapping back with no real end to the indecision. This is a scenario that plays out a lot in this game and it’s annoying when it does because as soon as the enemies surround you and you get stuck in that loop you can find half your life gone in the seconds it takes to register what’s going on.

Also implemented is this odd score based upgrade system. They did this because some of the weapons in the game are much more stronger then other weapons like the cane is stronger then the broom so every “10000” points I believe your strength meter goes up and you’re able to pick up the next tear of weapons. With this implementation it just feels a tad forced. It’s like the final days were winding down before the game was to be released and an executive walked in saying “Hey, lets get one of them upgrade thingys in the game.”  I don’t see why all the weapons couldn’t have done equivocal damage without having to just block us off to part of the content.

Finally, throughout the series Gravity Falls has interwoven encrypted messages that quite smartly leave them up in the air for the audience to decipher. It’s like giving catnip to a cat, if you give a decent enough encrypted message the Internet will take it and run with it. I won’t spoil any of the secrets but in Rumble’s there are several encrypted messages in the game, which are revealed by doing certain actions. After collecting them all and deciphering them you’ll find out a pretty interesting fact about the show. This definitely makes the game replayable, as most secret hunters will replay each level to find all the clues or just look them up on Google. One or the other.

To wrap up Rumble’s Revenge is a solid side scrolling beat‘em up that is true to the Gravity Falls universe with its great visuals, solid gameplay, and charming writing (I know. In a 4 level game? I couldn’t believe there was some actually funny dialogue moments). If the game allowed combos and there were a few more levels I could see this game as an XBLA/PSN or Steam game. But as it is it’s a ton of fun and I very much recommend it.

NOTE: To all those who play the game after reading this beware the final boss fight glitch with Rumble McSkirmish. Several times in my play through Rumble became invulnerable to my punches and kicks when he was stuck against the wall. Just keep him in the middle of the screen and you should be fine. PEACE 🙂