This review originally appeared on this site in June of 2005. I’ve brought it back from the dead to haunt your dreams once more.
I hate to spoil the review this early on, but The Ripping Friends sucks. If you are unfortunate enough to acquire a copy of this game, I advise you to put in the ‘Unlock Everything’ code (Right, L, Up, Down, B, Left, Left, Right, Left), play each level of the game for a few minutes and then either burn the game down or pass it along to one of your friends/relatives like that fruitcake nobody seems to want.
This game is based on the short-lived animated series of the same name, and about the same grade. In the videogame adventure you take one of the four brothers on several (six) missions to save the city/world/solar system from some of the baddies in the show. Typical stuff.
There’s very little that I can say good about this game, so let’s start off with what I found to be… well… not so good with it:
The game sounds terrible. The majority of the people in the game (including your characters) have the same generic “AAHH!” sound when you kill them. The music is catchy in the way where it sticks in your head and just won’t leave. It makes me want to turn up everything else in the house in the hopes that something else will get stuck in there and drive out the horrible sounds this game makes my Game Boy emit.
The game itself is tedium defined. Playing this game is as simple as staying in one room (area, whatever) while waves of enemies come at you (usually only a few at a time) until you’ve defeated enough so that the doors open and you can look around the labyrinthine levels to try and figure out where to go next. You do have a radar at your disposal, and it helpfully points to the direction of the nearest enemy for you to go and dispatch. If said enemy is on another screen, however, the radar quickly loses any effectiveness it might have otherwise had.
You can only have a maximum of 3 lives in this game. Now, I’m not saying that there aren’t any extra lives in this game, because they’re just about everywhere. You are only allowed to pick one up, though, if you’ve got less than three lives left.
The ‘Combo’ system is alluded to in the instruction manual a few times, but is never actually explained. Anywhere. Supposedly there is a way to induce a manly amount of pain on the unsuspecting hordes of similarly dressed clones, but the most I could manage was two hits in a row. Fighting the majority of the enemies (except for the bosses) goes something like this: Punch once, enemy falls down for 2 seconds, enemy gets up and is invincible for 2 seconds, punch enemy and he falls down for 2 seconds, etc., etc. This game might have been slightly less unbearable had I been able to plow through more than 3 enemies every 5 minutes.
The four Ripping Friends are identical as far as I could tell except for two things: they look different from each other, and they each have different ’special’ moves. The only special move really worth anything is Chunk’s, since it restores some of his health. You can pull off your special move after you fill up your ‘manliness meter’ by doing the alleged combos alluded to earlier, or just holding the ‘B’ button down for about 5 seconds.
The best thing about this game is that it came with a free Ripping Friends poster. Sure the show was bad and the game was on par with the show, but you get a double-sided poster in the box!
Game Name: The Ripping Friends
Platform: Game Boy Advance
Purchased from: EB Games
Amount of money I wasted on it: $4.99
One word summary: Pitiful