GAMES REVIEW – Regular Show: Galaxy Escape – Rescue Squad Impossible

January 16, 2017, the finale to Regular Show. One of the big animated series of the current generation alongside Adventure Time, Gravity Falls and even My Little Pony to some chagrin has closed its curtains on a relatively high note. I return to Bubble Blabber after a long hiatus to do a piece on a key factor of Regular Show that resonated a lot with its older audience and helped raise it to such success, retro gaming. It’s quite a key staple theme of the show as main characters Rigby and Mordecai are constantly making reference to or playing many assortments of video games, however that is in translation to the in TV-show world. Today we are looking at another iteration of the show brought into an 8-bit format with Galaxy Escape: Rescue Squad Impossible.

The contextual story is that the evil Dr. Dome with his butt chin has kidnapped and digitized the entire park crew, apart from Rigby and Mordecai, and trapped them within an arcade machine. Now it is up to the duo to beat this game and save their friends in this side scrolling space shooter. For a contextual story, it works for the game’s purposes of putting the park crew in some crazy space themed shoot outs and spaceships. And for the game’s fun quality itself, it is a pretty solid space shooter game… once you get your first upgrade and before the final realization is had while playing.

Controls are your typical arrow keys to have Mordecai move his space cruiser in the given direction with the added spice of four way shooting with Rigby using the WASD keys. You coordinated both sets of controls to fly around the moving screen, avoiding asteroids and blasting robots to complete 10 stages. Within the stages, you are able to pick up several power ups to change Rigby’s projectile between the initial green lazer, seeking missiles, constellation duck grenades, the rail gun and the big bang bomb. They all have different ranges and shot patterns to add variety to the shooting gameplay where it is definitely appreciated as without it this would have been a very standard space shooter with a Regular Show paint job. Aesthetic and design wise the pixel animation is very fluent and its visuals are very appealing reminding me a lot of the game Scott Pilgrim vs the World. Exhibiting a cute yet impactful flow to its gameplay with visuals to match. The sound design consists of a bit crushed score of electric guitar strums and drum beats which may get old after a long playthrough but for the short 10 level playthrough it accomplishes in setting the mood.

However, with all these pros said the game is still not that engrossing from a gameplay perspective. Starting the player off with a very slow and ineffective ship may have been done to start the difficulty curve of the game so when we play it we can grow in skill and enjoy the fast-paced shooting in later levels. But this choice, unfortunately, created the adverse effect of starting the game off at a snail’s pace flow which drew attention to how sadly slow everything is. While there are multiple weapon power-ups and upgrades to your ship can be gathered, it doesn’t really stop the sluggish feeling one gets while playing. Not to mention Rescue Squad has a very bad habit of not explaining some of its game mechanics. For example, at the end of each level, you are given three mission objectives to complete which are; to complete the level, to kill every enemy and to complete the level without getting hurt. Fairly standard objectives. Just wish the game actually took the time to at least label these objectives as such. Without that, it left me first wondering what each meant until I just assumed what they meant.

It creates a very nebulous tone around the game where you are more or less filling in the blanks yourself on some of the game’s features, which just seems like a lazy cop out so the developers don’t have to create key text to explain the contextual story or game mechanics. The moment that really got on my nerves was discovering the game’s “lives” system. At first glance you would suspect that you wouldn’t have a lives system because seen as clear as day there is your health bar and as such when it is depleted you die and must restart the level. But in fix points in the game you face off with Skips, Muscle Man and Pops as bosses and beating each one awards you with an ultimate move. During gameplay when their new gauge is filled you press the space bar and they cause an explosion that wipes out all enemies on screen. However, the explosions pull double duty, as I discovered, when your health from then on reaches 0 their ultimate attack is triggered killing everything on screen.

I thought at first there was some sort of glitch or I was pressing the space bar out of impulse or something but nope, all along as you were progressing through the game you were secretly getting training wheels strapped on to you so even in the final level you get multiple chances to finish it. This feels completely unneeded and if it was needed gives the impression the developers realized they created an unfair spike in difficulty which they deleted with the lives system. Progressing through the game should be a test of the player’s skill, just handing us this lives system and not even telling us about it feels like a cheap way to make the game more exciting. It did not make the game exciting for me. A game that I was actually enjoying at the start wore itself down with its underhanded hand-holding to just me considering it average. You’ll play the quick 10 levels of it and quickly forget you played it because at the end the game was playing itself.

If you are interested in playing Regular Show’s Galaxy Escape: Rescue Squad Impossible, then you can play it over at the Cartoon Network’s game section HERE.