Shiny

A quarter century ago, back when every major publisher was expected to have a cutesy mascot character, Electronic Arts scraped the bottom of the barrel to give us a robot hero named B.O.B. This little guy may have had big expressive eyes and a funky name in Japan, but the terrible gameplay and bad reviews doomed his chances of becoming the next Sonic or Mario. For most of my life, I have assumed that B.O.B. would be the worst robot-centric 2D platformer I would ever play. But that was before I got my hands on Shiny, an atrocious new PlayStation 4 game that somehow manages to screw up every single thing that makes platformers fun.

Originally released on PC and Xbox One, Shiny has finally made the leap to the PlayStation 4. This side-scrolling platformer tells the story of a worker robot named Kramer 227 who has been left to fend for himself after mankind abandoned their dying planet. It's Kramer's job to race through twenty challenging stages in order to harvest energy and rescue his robotic friends. If he can do all that, he'll be able to save himself and everybody else from certain doom.

I'm not going to lie, this game baffled me right from the start. We discover that the power has been turned off and all of Kramer's robot friends have been deactivated, which you would think would lead to Kramer diagnosing the problem and taking the right course of action. But instead what he does is jams his robot arms into a circuit board and wiggles them around until he gets electrocuted. He wakes up with a shiny glow that allows him to literally resurrect the dead robots the litter the planet. It's basically the laziest superhero origin story of all time.

What this leads to is a surprisingly inept side-scrolling platformer that manages to get all of the fundamentals wrong. Forget the stupid setup, because the real problem is that Kramer is barely controllable. He has loose control and kind of slides around the stage, a deadly combination when dealing with tough platforming challenges. This is only made worse by the occasionally laggy input and the way you'll sometimes fail to jump for no reason.

And just to be sadistic, the game will occasionally set our hero on fire. The good news is that you can cool off the robot by mashing the shoulder buttons, but this just means that you're hammering L2 and R2 while dealing with the already loose gameplay. It's a recipe for disaster and is every bit as frustrating as it sounds. This is one of the worst 2D platformers I have ever played.

And it's not just the slippery handling and the forgettable hero, but also the levels that range from bland to boring. These are ugly stages with predictable paths filled with frustrating obstacles. Even the bright and cheery stages are dark and gloomy, the kind of depressing backgrounds that made me desperate to escape. And they are poorly constructed, too. The designs are filled with annoying low ceilings, narrow paths and obstacles that require a lot of failing and memorizing. It doesn't help that the camera is pushed too far in, making it easy to miss simple platforms. And even if you do see the platform, the loose control almost assures that you'll end up falling down a bottomless pit instead of nailing the jump.

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Oh, and the sound effects suck. I know that it probably seems like I'm nitpicking now, but the bleeps and bloops are completely out of place in Shiny. The truth is, I didn't like much of the game's presentation, both from a visual and aural perspective. The cinema at the start is pretty good, but the rest of the game looks like an upscaled port of a fifteen year old PlayStation 2 game. There will be times when the action will be completely obstructed by something in the foreground, and the fact that I couldn't tell if this was a stylistic choice or a programming mistake is just another one of the many things wrong with Shiny.

Perhaps the game's biggest sin is that it never bothers to make you care about Kramer. The fact that he can literally resurrect robots from the dead like some religious figure is a great start to the character, but they don't really do anything with it. Those saved robots don't help Kramer and the story doesn't give him any other defining characteristics. He's not aggressive or shy or sarcastic, he's just a robot that clearly wasn't designed with 2D platforming in mind. At least Electronic Arts gave us a reason to care about B.O.B.

When I play games like Shiny, I worry that there may be a generation of gamers that grow up thinking that this is how 2D platformers are supposed to play. It's not. With loose controls, disastrously boring level designs and sound effects that will annoy you ever step of the way, this is a side-scrolling throwback that makes one horrible decision after another. Shiny is yet another example of why robots and 2D platformers don't mix.