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[Gerrard Rules]

You’ll be hopping mad at the latest arcade game!

Frogger 2 has finally made it to the xbox live arcade! But is this necessarily a good thing? The game is a jazzed up revival of the old classic, Frogger – you know, cross the road and don’t get squished? Yeah, you got it! It’s back, but are Konami up to the job of making Frogger even better?

No, would seem to be the answer. However, this new revival is no longer a simple ‘dodge the cars and reach the other side’ basic game. No sir! Now you must play as Frogger, the frog who can’t swim, on an adventure to help Pico the space alien to find parts of his crashed UFO and return to space.

The gameplay is not fantastic, but the controls are simple. By using the joystick or D-pad to move around, and a tap of the A button for your ‘tongue attack’ (Which actually doesn’t kill enemies at all, but grabs far away items), even the newest of gamers can play Frogger 2. However, be careful when moving that you do not even tap the joystick if you wish to remain still. One slight movement of it will send Frogger leaping forward in a bid to reach the other side, and will instead send him falling down to his doom. The game also features a small customisation feature, by way of allowing you to choose the colour of your frog! Yes, you can have either blue, red, yellow or even, surprisingly, green! You can also change how many lives you are allowed to have before a game over, and how long you have to complete each level.
The game does, however, feature xbox live, allowing you to race against your friends or battle for who can collect the most jewels.

The music is classically Frogger – annoying and repetitive. To stop myself from muting the TV, I found it necessary to play my own music over the top. The sound effects are also equally annoying. Every time your frog hops somewhere, you get a loud, monotone beep. Collecting coins has a ‘ding’ sound, and dying even has it’s own theme tune! If each level had different music, the sounds could probably be described as bearable. However, after about two levels, you will find yourself hearing repeated tracks of the frustratingly off-putting jingle.

The graphics are not incredible – in fact, it would be pushing it to say they are above the standard of that of a Gamecube. The best thing to say is that they get the right amount of effect into any shining objects, or glittering ones. Your surroundings are always very basic, and your frog is about the same.

The game is, considering it is an arcade game, rather long. With each level containing two stages, you would need a lot of patience to finish each level first time. However, this can work against you, in the fact that you can become so irritated that your 360 pad is close to going out of the window – or at the frog on the screen!

Overall, I found the game annoying and definitely not worth the 800 Microsoft points it is priced at. But if you really loved Frogger back in the day, a new and re-vamped version could be great for you. Just don’t expect to see me playing it too much.

Rating: 4.5