Dangerous Road (3DS)

 I had big hopes for this one. The title made me think it might be some Destruction Derby-style racing game, or maybe something topdown like Action Fighter or Gekitotsu Dangan Jidousha Kessen: Battle Mobile, Raising my hopes higher was how I discovered it: on a list of works by SIMS, those tireless stalwarts of the Master System and Game Gear in the early nineties, and I was excited to learn that they were still around and active as recent as 2016. They even worked on the most recent Ape Escape game in 2023!

 

Unfortunately, actually playing the game dashed all of those hopes. As Tak Fujii once said long ago, while toiling in the Konami shovelware mines: "It's a Frogger". I think the last time I saw a Frogger knockoff was on the Atari 2600, but here's one that came out in 2016 on the 3DS. It has a couple of new ideas, though! There are four playable characters, each with their own special ability, like being able to slow time for a few seconds or having slightly faster movement than the others.

 

The aim of the game is very slightly different to traditional frogger, too. Instead of just crossing the road to get home a few times per stage, you've instead got to go back and forth seeking out numbered flags (in order), before getting the stage clear flag. That's in the main Goal Run mode, at least. There's also that insanely irresponsible Survival Run mode. This one sees you trapped on a busy multi-lane highway (with a few train tracks to mix things up too), and your only aim is to survive for sixty seconds. It didn't really hit me how crazy it was for a game that seems to be aimed at kids to literally have a "play in traffic" mode until after I'd stopped playing. 

 

I think what really hurts this game is the lack of scores. Especially in Survival Run: there's a star item that appears occasionally that gives you five seconds of invincibilty, destroying any vehicles that hit you in this time. It's a mildly amusing effect the first few times, but they might as well have just made it an item that reduced the remaining time by five seconds. If there was a score, and you got points for destroying the vehicles in this way, there'd be some point to this. I guess you'd score points when not invincible by playing chicken, and moving out of the way of vehicles as close to being hit as possible. But then I guess that would also exacerbate the irresponsibility of the mode.

 

This is a game that exists. It's not terrible, but it's not particularly good, either. There's nothing about it that I can recommend, as it's just completely unremarkable. I played it because of the title, and to see what SIMS had been up to in recent times. Through reading this review, you've now got that information, and don't need to bother.