Joe Danger 2 Review
Expect your thumbs to blister, bubble, and bleed before you give up on this one
The jetpack is a real change of pace compared to the other vehicles that make you feel like you should combo the whole stage at full pelt despite the ridiculous amounts of danger from start to finish. Here you’ll need to hover through spiked gauntlets and fly around chasing coin trails.
The action takes place on various movie sets with multiple levels for each. Rather than work through one movie at a time, Joe changes between them constantly, making for a pleasing lack of repetition. We have a jungle setting, underground mines, snowy mountains with missile silos or busy streets perfect for cop chases.
The obstacles are made up of giant buzzsaws, flame belching totems, spiked road traps, barricades, grenades, gunships, exploding barrels and much more. Later stages become a stern challenge of memory and reflexes as the amount of obstacles suddenly become very compact, leaving you little room for error.
The game comes with a level editor allowing you to create anything that you might find in the main game, along with a few things you won’t. It’s very simple to use, especially compared to something like LittleBigPlanet. Although, you can feel free to try other players’ creations instead of making your own.
Multiplayer is heavily reliable on competing for times and scores on the leaderboards of the single-player levels. It’s brilliantly integrated and will have you hitting restart over and over to climb local, friends and global leaderboards.
There are no direct competitive multiplayer options online but there is local support for four players. This is the only really disappointing side of the game with only five events available. Vehicles, track and race type are all locked over these events, meaning you’ll be bored of them in half an hour. Races, capture the flags (think of it more as having lives), wheelie-boost only and staying on screen (like Micro Machines) make up the modes and they’re entertaining enough, but not being able to choose certain modes for certain stages with different vehicles is a real letdown and not the ending this otherwise excellent game deserves.