Review: Cocoto Platform Jumper (Wiiware)
Cocoto Platform Jumper originally came out for the Gamecube and PS2 back in 2004, according to its Wiki page. I reference wikipedia, as I have absolutely no memory of it whatsoever – not even a flicker of vague recollection of its release. So when I loaded up the Wiiware release of Cocoto Platform Jumper, I was a complete Cocoto virgin. In fact, it wasn’t until I did some research on Cocoto, the little game’s red devil mascot, that I discovered there are other Cocoto games. They all have such unique and original titles such as Cocoto Kart Racer and, bizarrely, Cocoto Fishing Master. However, despite my apprehension, Cocoto Platform Jumper turned out to be quite good fun, even if it is a mouthful to say.
As previously mentioned, you play as the character Cocoto, a rather cute little red devil. From what I could gather from the very brief opening cut scene, Cocoto’s other little devil friends have been kidnapped, leaving Cocoto with the task of saving them. In doing so, he has to traverse five different worlds consisting of 40 levels in all, as well as defeat various enemies and five fearsome bosses.
The levels all look fairly similar. For old school gamers, they form a pretty neat mixture of Nebulus and Rainbow Islands. As Cocoto, you must navigate a circular stage, in order to reach the top and advance to the next level. You can double jump up these platforms, as well as fire magmas at the foes trying to impeed your advancement. Memories of Rainbow Islands come from the magma arcs which Cocoto can fire. These help you get to out of reach places, as well as enable you to trap foes or destroy them with the touch of the magma arc.
Of course, little Cocoto is vulnerable to attack too. One touch of an enemy or a fire platform (yes, ironically even devils can’t walk on fire) and you can lose a life. To stop this from happening, you can collect pieces of fruit which act in the same manner as rings for Sonic the Hedgehog, giving you an extra chance to make a mistake. However, get hit and the pieces of fruit fly across the level, and most of the time it’s tricky to get them back. Luckily, all the levels provide a series of checkpoints throughout. This means that if you do die, you’re never far from the place you were killed. This greatly helps reduce frustration in later levels, where things can get quite busy.
Each world has a certain theme, although I didn’t find it made much of a difference. Rather appropriately for a devil, you start out in Hell (or the Abyss as the game calls it), progressing through worlds such as Atlantis, Volcano, Jungle and culminating in Heaven. At times, the action can get a little irritating. As the name would imply, accurate platforming is crucial in a game like this. For experienced platform veterans, there won’t be much of a problem and you should burn through the game within a few hours. However if you’re not used to this style of game, you might find yourself dying a quite a few times at certain sections. Despite all of this, I found the game to have the right balance, ensuring that action wasn’t too easy, while not being annoyingly difficult either. It was definitely very satisfying to get past an awkward section, or to defeat a boss.
Initially, I found the bosses to be quite predictable. All of them involved figuring out the pattern and attacking at the right moment. That all changes when I reached the Gorilla boss at the end of the Jungle world. I simply could not get past him. It certainly felt as if the difficulty had been ramped up a bit too dramaticlly, all at once. Until that boss enocunter, I felt that the game was aimed at being relatively easy to complete as compared to more old school platformers, but being able to save the game after each level’s completion might have been a small part of that.
Besides the single player mode, there are also two multi-player modes. Battle mode a proved to be a little dull. Two players have to duel it out until one of them loses all five of their hit points. On the flipside, race mode was quite good fun, however. Up to 4 players race their way up the screen, risking being knocked off-screen and losing one of their three hit points. I found this a lot more enjoyable to play with a friend, as it felt more like a challenge. It would have been great to see a time trial mode in Cocoto. This felt a missed opportunity that would have increased longevity a fair bit, and certainly would have encouraged me to complete the levels as quickly as possible.
Cocoto Platform Jumper is no stunning beauty to look at, as it is quite clearly a straight port from the Gamecube/PS2 days. The audio was much the same as others from that era, being distinctly average and fairly forgettable. However, I found myself able to forgive Cocoto Platform Jumper for the most part. Sure it’s nothing very innovative, but for 700 Nintendo points, it is a good solid platformer. This is really not the sort of game that could ever possibly hope to rival a Mario title, but if you fancy a change and happen to have some spare points, it’s certainly not the worst title you could pick. Unfortunately for Cocoto, for a mere 100 points more, you could get Donkey Kong Country, a much superior title. So, when you look at it like that, it does make Cocoto fairly hard to recommend without reservation.
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