Super Comboman

Sigh. Sometimes I walk away not liking a game and I just know it’s going to get me hate mail. So, it’s with a sense of dread that I say that I utterly hated Super Comboman, the latest title published by Adult Swim Games. I’m a big fan of their label. They’ve been on a hot streak lately, with titles like Volgarr the Viking being pretty cool. Super Comboman looked like it was trying to take a page from Viewtiful Joe’s playbook. I was a big Viewtiful Joe fan as a kid, so I was pretty excited for this one. At first, I thought Super Comboman was going to be something special. And it is. In the same way that someone who can’t remember to put their pants on before their shoes is special.

The idea is you’re a guy named Struggles who has to brawl his way through levels for some reason. I couldn’t really follow the story, except that everything is supposed to be made of stickers. That’s why your character and all the enemies have white outlines. You’re also supposed to have a fanny pack that looks like Pikachu, because that’s quirky and indie or something, but really, it looks more like a dog. I’m not a fan of the white-outlines art direction, which is pretty needless. Hell, many people aren’t even grasping the whole sticker-concept to begin with, nor does the game do any sticker-based special moves from what I can tell. There’s nothing wrong with the concept. They just didn’t do anything with it. Gameplay wise, Super Comboman is about brawling enemies and trying to chain together as large a string of combos as you can. It does have personality and cool character designs. And that’s about where the nice things I have to say about Super Comboman end.

I don’t know why they bothered with the sticker gimmick at all. Unless getting stuck in a jump animation, unable to move (as if you’re stuck there just like a sticker), is part of it. In this picture, my character is doing just that. Stuck. For no reason. Yeah, there are some glitches. Well, quite a few actually.

Same picture? No. Look at the time stamp. The only c-c-c-combobreaker in this game is the numerous glitches.

In the interest of full disclosure, I put seven hours into Super Comboman and couldn’t make it past the first “real” stage. Not for a lack of effort, but I had issues either getting stuck and unable to move (and I mean that literally. More on that later) or would get massacred by the enemies as they sandwiched me between them and pelted me with pick-axes that drained my life what seemed far too quickly. Insult my lack of skills all you wish. I’ll fully agree with you on that front, but I think I can safely blame the game for a lot of it. Having just played three straight games with very good play control, Super Comboman aggravated me to no end. Myself and the small circle of friends that also received pre-release review copies couldn’t pull off a single aerial-based special attack or combo. The timing of it is next to impossible. This is because “popping” the enemies into the air doesn’t throw them high enough, and then there’s a delay in jumping up to catch them. I bought a move called a “piledriver” that only requires you to press down and B midair to execute it. I wasn’t able to pull off the move until five hours after I had unlocked it. That makes me somewhat privileged, since none of my friends could execute it. We all struggled with wall-jumping too. It’s done by holding the jump button and pressing the opposite direction. The timing of it was just so off, we began skipping caches of coins that required you to use it. It just wasn’t worth the frustration.

The controls are just plain not responsive enough for the kind of gameplay the developers wanted. And the fighting itself is boring. Comboman tries to change things up by making unlockable “perks”, of which you can control two at once. There’s a problem though: the first perk you equip doesn’t activate until you’ve hit a THIRTY FUCKING HIT COMBO! Thirty!! And, as soon as the combo’s timer runs out, you lose whatever perk you’ve earned. I don’t know how much it takes for the second perk to activate, because I never got a combo higher than 40 something. One of the reasons for that is, in rooms where multiple enemies spawn, sometimes it takes too long for them to actually do that. You might have to wait for them to blink out of existence before another shows up to keep the combo going, and by time you’re in range of them, your meter has run out. That happened a lot. But, a lot of the time (and I mean a lot), the game glitches out and you get screwed by its busted engine. For example, look at this picture.

See where it says “Workers –> 5” on the wall? That tells you the number of enemies left to kill in this particular room. The two pipes you see with the down arrows spawn enemies. There are only two enemies at a time, and one is defeated and blinks out of existence, another one gets pooped out as soon as you run under a pipe. At least, that’s how it is supposed to work. One time in this same room, I had a fairly large combo going, and I cleared all the baddies. Only, I didn’t. There was one left to spawn. I ran under the right pipe. Nothing. I ran under the left pipe. Nothing. The door was still locked and it said I still had one guy left to go. By this point, my combo was totally gone, but I was still stuck waiting for the douchebag enemy to show up. I ran the full length of the room back and forth, passing under the pipes multiple times. Nothing. I started jumping up and down. Nothing. Finally, after running in place against the locked door for a few seconds, the pipe finally shit out the last guy I had to fight. Over a minute had passed. This happened more than once too.

It’s possible the dude was frozen midair. That happens quite frequently as well. At first, I thought it was only me. Sometimes when you land on platforms, your character gets stuck in the “jump” animation and can’t move (as seen in the pictures above). You can change what direction you face, but you’re stuck. Sometimes you can use a special move to get yourself out of it, but sometimes you can’t and you have to restart the stage. Pro Tip: buy the air dash right away, since that’s the easiest way to get yourself unstuck, though even that doesn’t work every time.

Later, I noticed it was happening to the bad guys too. I took video of it.

It was around this point, seven hours in with even the enemies being screwed over by bugs, that I realized this shit is not finished yet. Yes, I suck at brawling games and I didn’t even finish the first stage. But I think a solid argument could be made that I simply never had an attempt at finishing that damn stage without a glitch happening. Literally the only thing that was consistent was the game doing stuff I’m pretty sure it wasn’t supposed to do. Take this puzzle. I numbered the different sections of it.

You have to take the enemies that spawn at spot #1 and do a “smash” move to them. They should fly into the cement wall at spot #2 and break it. You can’t break it yourself, because the electric fence, which enemy bodies pass through (sometimes at least. A lot of the time they get stuck on it). Then, you have to hit a different enemy at spot #1 and have them bounce off the mattress at spot #3, which is hypothetically supposed to bounce them up into the button next to spot #4. A perfectly fine puzzle, when it works. But the physics just are not consistent enough. The enemy always drops out of the same position in the pipe. Smashing him immediately upon landing almost always lands him on the mattress (when he doesn’t fail to pass through the electric fence), but doesn’t always cause him to hit the button. Trying it in different positions doesn’t make a difference either. It’s really a matter of luck getting the puzzle to work the way its supposed to. I mean, you can’t have a puzzle with that much inconsistency. It’s annoying.

Sometimes it took so long I wondered if I actually had done it right and the button was broken. That actually happened to me twice, where I went to smash a button and it just wouldn’t press in. One time it was with the very first button in the first non-tutorial stage, and I had to immediately restart the level. Now mind you, I wasn’t the only one this kind of shit was happening to. Didn’t anyone play-test this thing? Sprites disappear. Characters get stuck. Buttons don’t always activate. Puzzles don’t always work right. This is the most glitch-filled game I’ve seen since Poker Night 2. I can’t even make a joke about it. It’s so disappointing.

There’s nothing in Super Comboman that can’t be fixed. They can iron the kinks out of the fighting (they really ought to tone down the enemy sponginess while they’re at it) and the glitches can be patched out. But its present release feels like a beta in need of at least six months worth of fine-tuning. The brawling gets repetitive, the enemies are too repetitive, and what the FUCK was the point of the whole sticker thing? Why even have such a novel concept if you’re not going to take advantage of everything being stickers? Why bother to include the perks when activating them and keeping them active is so damn hard? The sluggish controls and frequent glitches push this past the point of being tolerable. I loved the personality of the game, and you can tell real effort and thought was given to the play mechanics. They just didn’t finish it. The foundation for something really good is laid here, but the cement was still wet and now its starting to sink.

Super Comboman was developed by Interabang Entertainment

Point of Sale: Steam

$11.99 (price raises to $14.99 on July 18, 2014) was prematurely born on July 11 too, but at least I was only a couple of weeks early in the making of this review.

An early review copy of Super Comboman was provided to Indie Gamer Chick by Adult Swim Games. Our policy is that we pay for all of our own games. Upon the release of the game, a copy will be purchased by Cathy. For more on this policy, check our FAQ.