Ugly Americans Apocalypsegeddon Review

**Smore ninja** · September 16th, 2011

Ugly Americans is an Arcade game based on the show, which can be found on Comedy Network with the same name. Ugly Americans the game is a shooter of the twin-stick variety with several additional elements mixed in with the humour that the show provides. I had never even heard of the show before trying out the game and not due to the fact that I’m Canadian. However, Comedy Network readily provides many episodes online. Ugly Americans obviously exists to attract attention to the show and it does a good job of that since I did end up watching a few episodes. As a game though, Ugly Americans is an average one at best.

Ugly Americans starts off with an intro cinematic that follows the style of the show and can continue to be seen throughout the rest of the game. After actually beginning the game you can pick between one of four characters from the show. The gameplay is very simple, being a twin stick shooter. The left thumbstick is for movement while the right thumbstick is for shooting. Your choices of weapons are the variety of household items that you find in every day life, varying from Baseballs to Demonic false teeth. Pressing the right trigger uses your special attack, which is different for each character. If you are playing multiplayer and one of you teammates loses all of their health, you can then run to them and press Y to revive them. Each individual level is called a case and to complete the level, essentially, you need to keep running to the right and kill all of the enemies. Ugly Americans has a system where you level up according to the experience gained by killing enemies. When you level up you gain an attribute point, which you can then use to upgrade your stats.

The levelling system is one thing that makes each character more individual as each attribute has a maximum amount of points that you can fulfill and each limitation is different for each character. For example, Leonard will have much less max health then Grimes can have. The second thing that makes each character unique is the weapons that you use. There are many weapons that you can pick up throughout the course of the game and each weapon has a different fire rate, spread pattern, and impact effect. Not only can each weapon alter your character’s stats, but depending on which character you are playing as, the weapon can have it’s own special effect as well. The last factor that makes your character individual is the demon babies you can pick up after beating the first boss in the game. They bestow special effects, like increased experience per kill or higher damage the closer you are to death.

With multiple ways to customize your character, obviously there must be some combinations that would make the game very easy. Sadly, this is not really the case. In general, the stats don’t really scale the difficulty in your favour. Generally speaking, Ugly Americans is a very hard game and will require you to repeat some levels several times. This constant repetition of levels is great for increasing your stats, but the overall increase of your stats does not help make the game any easier. The big problem with Ugly American’s difficulty is that their way of making the game harder is by giving their enemies more health with little variety in the actual enemies themselves. This makes the boss encounters more tedious then challenging and very infuriating if you die and need to start over. Power ups are available to help tip the scales in your favour and a majority of them are very helpful, like a health boost or a temporary increase speed, but a common power-up is a temporary decrease in damage received and when a key factor is avoiding enemy attacks, more often then not, the power-up goes unused. Ugly Americans does feature a co-op mode where you can team up with three other people and play through the levels. While it would be safe to assume that having another person shooting the enemy and the ability to revive you in case you fall sounds like something that would make the game much easier, but Ugly Americans does compensate for the increased help by greatly increasing the amount of enemies which appear. This does make the co-op more fun and chaotic with the only issue being that with so much going on it is easy to lose yourself in the fray.

The visual style of Ugly Americans plays a great role, as it is colourful and follows the style of the show. But, with very little variety in some levels the visuals do get a tad tedious and this tends to become a common theme throughout the game. There are few enemy types and each one cycles only a few lines. Because it is rare that enemies of different types are grouped together, repeatedly hearing these lines loses their humour and instead gets very old very fast. I was tired of Man-Birds after the first level. However, as tedious as the lines were, they did become more enjoyable after watching the show and having a better understanding of the original content.

Ugly Americans Apocalypsegeddon is at best an average game with nothing to keep it interesting after completing the story because the journey from start to finish was highly repetitive. Ugly Americans did try to make up for its shortcomings with style, a basic upgrade system, and the shows humour. But, this was only minimally effective unless you were already a fan of the show.

Overall Rating:
5/10

**Jawwi** · September 17th, 2011

I didn't think the game would be too good since the show isn't that great either. It's an okay show but, I didn't think they could make a good game out of it.