Game Review: Hot Streets “Chubbie in Trouble”

Obligatory tie-in game GO!

To celebrate the premiere season of their new show “Hot Streets”, Adult Swim presents a slapped together aesthetically similar browser game for you to chuckle at and then instantly get bored of. The game’s set up is based specifically on the show’s second episode “Snake Island”, wherein Justin Roiland as a dog AKA Chubbie Webbers gets addicted to an intoxicating substance called “murder powder” and eventually uses its powers to defeat a group of snake cultists, thus completely proving my parole officer wrong in our debate about the existence of “functional” drug addicts. For the record, HE’S the addict; I’M being prosecuted for tax evasion.

Anyway, the goal of the game is pretty simple: Four players, one plays Chubbie and can gain powers from the murder powder, the other three try to kill him before he can get to it, and so on. Essentially, it’s Pacman with up to three players in the role of the ghosts. Play as any one of your favorite Hot Streets characters! Except Donavan Kim, for some reason. Maybe he’ll be in DLC.

Because the game is Multiplayer only, I managed to get a couple friends together to mostly fill out the roster. One friend played Chubbie, and the other friend and I rotated between Branksi, French, Jen. We started picking out certain negligible aspects about the weapons, like how French’s snake arrows might be the better human weapon due to their length. the game started as a free-for-all, but something slowly dawned us as the body count racked up:

Chubbie cannot be killed.

Once he gets ahold of the murder powder, he’s completely invincible and can kill a player instantly within a relatively big range, while the human characters need three precise hits in order to kill him. Chubbie also doesn’t need to worry about friendly fire, which slows down human characters considerably, and then you’re that much closer to a fiery end. Our only hope was ambushing Chubbie in an area with no powder, but don’t hold your breath on this happening much. The player controlling Chubbie can basically float from one batch of powder to the next with ease and no resistance. Many attempts were made to pull this ambush off, including hiding the character sprite inside the powder, but nine times out of ten, there will be powder right nearby to completely destroy them.

And things aren’t all good times for people playing Chubbie either. After a few turns obliterating the humans chasing them, they soon learned about the always-close proximity of powder and fine-tuned what little strategy there was to the game. Plus, unlike the humans, who rotate between characters at the end of each round, people playing Chubbie stay locked in until they get bored enough to allow themselves to die. Once all of that becomes apparent to anyone playing this, whatever fun instantly drains out.

I can’t imagine Adult Swim going back and tweaking what is essentially an obligatory product they churned out in a rush, but if they do, the first thing would be REALLY spacing out the powder spots so that Chubbie players can’t just coast on that ad nauseam. Next, have Chubbie be in rotation with the rest of the characters so one person isn’t stuck with absolutely no challenge at all. Lastly, shake up the stages to different layouts and skins after each round, maybe with different backgrounds from the show’s other Season 1 episodes.

Simply put, this isn’t something I see many people spending much time on, but the show’s quintessential Adult Swim-ish humor is fully on display, so perhaps that will sate you for about an hour. Max.