First Look Xbox #1

Mojo! by FarSight Studios / Crave Entertainment (2003) - Xbox

Since I've been collecting for the original Xbox, a lot of the games I've encountered have been ones already familiar to me - I'm sure you all know the big hitters as well as I do - but it's finding the more obscure titles like Mojo! that I've enjoyed the most. It cost me a mere £1.50 so it was undoubtedly a bargain and I was really looking forward to giving it a try. It's a platform/action/puzzle game which places you in command of a ball of some sort, much like the splendid Kula World. The objective here, however, is a bit more destructive than it was in the PS1 classic, but also somewhat simpler - just destroy all the colourful cube blocks on each stage by rolling into them. You have to change the colour of your ball to match the blocks you want to destroy using special 'infuser' transformation things but there isn't a great deal more to it really. Sounds like it could be a lot of fun!

There are a crapload of stages as well - over a hundred, supposedly, set over a range of environments filled with all kinds of features, obstacles, and traps. It sounded like just the sort of game I would like. Sadly, as I soon discovered, it has an often-tight time limit which quickly ruined near enough all my enjoyment, especially since falling off the edge of a stage results in a rather large time penalty. On my first attempt I got as far as the eighth stage I think it was, but just couldn't reach all the blocks in time. This was therefore the extent of my progress. Stage eight out of at least one hundred. Grrr! That kind of thing annoys me - tons of stages but too tough to see even a fraction of them. Some slightly 'sticky' ball movement doesn't help matters either. If it wasn't for that bloody time limit I would probably enjoy this game as much as I expected to. Should I give it another chance?

RKS Score: 2/5