“Hey, check out my new mask!”
“You check out my new mask!”
“Dammit, we should have discussed this.”
“It’s more confusing than one would have assumed!”
In Full Mojo Rampage‘s moderately clear story, there is some voodoo stuff going on. That’s honestly as much as I can remember. You play as a little undead guy, you team up with other little undead guys to do your mission, whatever that might be. It’s the kind of game where you run around on the 2D map, constantly shoot projectiles, and hope you kill the enemies before they get to you. I guess it is technically an ARPG.
Before each run, you select your
- guiding Loa, which is basically your class, gives you access to a passive bonus and two special attacks;
- pins, which are dynamically changeable stat bonuses;
- and your cute voodoo mask, which is purely aesthetical.
Then you go on a quest, usually themed around helping a specific Loa. In each quest, there is a world map that contains different levels, you can choose which way to progress, although it’s always kinda linear, and you have to fight your way through the levels to the main boss at the end.
The levels themselves are either boss fights or about running around collecting / finding stuff. On regular levels, you might have a mission like collect 5 skeleton bones, and once you have them, you can open the door, and go to the next level. The bosses are these “giant heads that shoot out smaller heads in a mesmerising circle” kind of deal. You know, like in the old games, when nobody cared about physics or story or basic perspective rules. There is a giant ball, shoots other balls, you evade and shoot back. Or it might be a chain of balls that moves very quickly. And there is an angry face drawn on it. You get the picture.
The game is kinda roguelike: in each level, you have three lives, and when you run out, that’s it, you can start again. But it’s not an absolutely hardcore roguelike, if you do clear the quest, you can go to the next one, and your progress is saved. I guess technically it’s a checkpoint system. You also level up, you can always improve your character with gold (by upgrading pins), and medals (by getting access to new Loas).
The Good
Improving your character is genuinely satisfying, it is always fun to try out new Loas (and realise that you should stick to your default one), and optimise your combo. The game comes with just the right amount of “hitting your head against the wall” kind of difficulty, which for us means you do want to get better, you do want to level up, and finally beat the level.
Full Mojo Rampage is also absolutely hilarious, it has a very unshackled and completely random approach to humour. The weirdest, most unexpected things happen. Once, we got transported to an 8-bit world with a random event, but we still had to progress through the game as usual. We had a blast. I think humour is the single most difficult thing to get right in a game, because you have to write jokes that work very well for the first time AND after many repeats. This game somehow delivers. Either that, or I was just very tired when we played.
The game is also refreshingly non-restrictive. It honestly feels like someone put very random rules together, and then didn’t really care if it made any sense whatsoever, or provided a consistent gameplay experience, just let the simulation go. Two examples showcasing this side of the game:
- Occasionally, you get random choices. For example, in the middle of a quest, a Loa might ask you if you want to increase your health to 10x, but lose the healing ability. That is an interesting tradeoff. But it’s random, and there are multiple such occasions for each level. So what happens if by some astronomical chances you get the same offer twice? Nothing, the game abides by its own rules, you do get the buff twice. So you have 100x of your original health, with no healing, sure, but from that point on, the quest is a cakewalk.
- Most of the weapons you can find shoot various types of little projectiles, and you have to hit the enemy with them. There is a wand with that does not shoot the usual projectiles, but instead emits a constant ray. There is also a random tradeoff choice where you can greatly increase the attack power at the cost of greatly decreasing the attack speed. What happens if you combine the random tradeoff with the wand shooting the ray, which basically has an infinite attack speed? Again, what you would expect, the ray is still constant, but the attack power is greatly increased.
There must be various other funny interactions that we did not find. It was refreshing and old-school.
The Bad
My most serious gripe with the game is that despite all the checkpoints, it still feels like a roguelike, and I do hate them, I think they are a lazy and boring way to simulate progress in games (sue me). You don’t have to restart the whole game, sure, but you still have to restart the quest, even after one silly mistake, and it takes almost an hour to finish one quest. Most of the time, the early levels on a quest are trivial, and it’s one specific boss fight you have problems with, but you still have to redo the whole quest from the boring beginning. It was not terrible enough for us to stop playing the game, but it came close.
Kinda tied to the previous point, it is super annoying how you can’t skip discussions with the Loas. I thought that we as a society decided that games should stop doing this. It was especially frustrating on the dreaded third quest, which we must have tried more than five times, and there is a half a minute unskippable dialogue at the start.
There is not much detail about the stats in the game, in general, I never like having to look stuff up on the dedicated wiki site, especially with a silly game like this. And it’s actually quite complicated, different Loas have different math formulas behind the spell damage. Depending on how physical and spell damage statistics are translated, there is separate damage and critical damage and spell damage and spell potency, but you are just shooting red balls so it is very unclear what is going on. I think that for such a silly game, they could have stuck to one stat, attack power, or something.
Voodoo theme is cute and unique and all, but it should basically be skeletons, zombies, rum, cigars, and maybe blues music. That is like five things. They ran out of these thematic elements very, very fast, and what we were left with afterwards were frozen “voodoo” penguins and giant “voodoo” shark people with many swords. What I’m saying is the theme is very weak and almost nonexistent.
And finally, we did not like the end, it was very meh. Probably second only to Outward. They could have used like five sentences of story text to provide some sort of closure. It’s the kind of game that seems like went out of its way to end as unceremoniously as possible. It succeeded, but why?
The Co-Op
Interestingly, there is not even as much co-operation as in a standard ARPG (and that’s a low bar!), you are basically running around and shooting at the same stuff.
On the plus side, you do have to revive each other, that’s always nice and intense. OK, one quite unique aspect I can think of is that this is a very rhythmical game, you really have to get in the zone of moving back and forth and pull some enemies but not all, and getting in sync with the other player in that aspect is rather interesting.
The Recommendation
Actually, Full Mojo Rampage is OK, but I would not go as far as outright recommending it to anyone. It’s a fun little piece, but you should not go in expecting too much – you have your fun for a few hours, and then forget everything when it’s over.
Info
| Release Year | 2014 |
| Genre | ARPG |
| Difficulty | Hard |
| Number of Players | 1 to 4 |
| Length | 45 minutes per run, 10 hours for campaign on Normal difficulty |
Rating
| Overall | Mediocre |
| Story | Bad |
| Co-Operation | Mediocre |