Few games have earned the reputation Bubsy has cultivated over the past decade. Fewer still managed to hang around to tell the tale, since it’s a very competitive industry. The concept of a game getting shut down within weeks and the studio being subsequently shuttered is not unheard of. Still, it’s also not a new phenomenon, as anyone old enough to remember the E.T. game fiasco would tell you. And yet, in this era of franchises being stuck in purgatory, Bubsy has managed to make a comeback.
Fabraz, the team behind Demon Turf and Demon Tides, was approached by Atari and asked to pitch a Bubsy game. Atari’s CEO, Wade Rosen, had a particular fondness for the character and wanted the infamous bobcat to have his day in the spotlight. Since the studio was already contending with their fanbase asking them to do it, they decided to take on the challenge. It was time for Bubsy to have a good game.
What Was the Plan to Revive Bubsy?
Watch any interview with the devs, and you’ll get the core idea of how they wanted to approach this revival. Regardless of Bubsy’s reputation, the first order of business was to make a great platformer. There are tons of materials to make memes out of the bobcat, but the game itself had to deliver. No dev sets out to purposefully make a bad game, but few manage to find the motivation to treat the infamous franchise with respect.
Focusing on their specialty, the goal was to make a platformer as expressive as possible. Multiple movement options that can work in tandem to produce unexpected results. The game has one “default” path where you only have to use the bare minimum to clear its hazards, but that’s not the only consideration in its design. Many paths exist within a single level where you can skip or trivialize huge portions of the stage. Of course, said paths come at a certain price. They are considerably harder to execute. Much of the game’s runtime is meant to teach you the basic flow of movement. And only then are you expected to delve into its timed challenges.
The leading philosophy was to make the player feel like they’re breaking the game, doing things they weren’t supposed to achieve. And even knowing that this was intended, you can still feel the power of completely ignoring much of the default path’s level design. Fabraz was successful in making the player feel like they’re outsmarting them with the insane tricks you can pull.
A Good Experience Hidden Behind a Weird First Impression
During my first few minutes with the game, my initial thought was that the movement felt too floaty. It’s hard to put into words what exactly felt off, but I think some may experience it as well during their first moments with the game. Right after its intro cutscene, the game forces you into the tutorial: a VR program made by the supporting character Virgil. In the tutorial, you’re told the primary tools you’ll need across your first playthrough. And simply going through the motions doesn’t immediately feel natural. The game expects you to adapt to its unique philosophy.
First off, you have the staples of the 3D genre: Omnidirectional movement (although the mad lads at Fabraz made the classic tank controls a toggleable option) and both a jump and a double jump. Right off the bat, you also have glide and pounce. Glide allows you to gain a little more vertical and horizontal distance after a jump, but it’s mostly used for control. It’s very useful until you get used to Bubsy’s jump arc.
Pounce is another move that demonstrates the various complexities of the platforming. In theory, it’s a straightforward movement option where Bubsy simply lunges forward, which is great for horizontal movement, but can’t get you more height by itself. The catch is that this move is highly contextual: use it on the ground, and you can make a long jump as you start running. If you use it on the wall, you clamber up for a while, or if you wait for a lock-on with certain objects or enemies, you’ll hone right into them, much like a certain blue hedgehog.
Hitting one of the aforementioned maneuvers also resets your aerial options. Glide, double jump, and pounce all become available again, opening possibilities for long strings of actions without ever touching the ground. That’s just the base kit at your disposal: the game isn’t afraid to throw even more complexity at the player as they progress through the levels.
There are the classic wall jumps, where you can climb vertically by hopping off two walls that are close by. A wall jump doesn’t reset your aerial options, but it can be used in tandem with them. Some walls also allow for omnidirectional movement within them, and those actually do allow you to jump/glide/pounce again. There are always a few details you’ll only learn through trial-and-error.
Even with all of the various maneuvers you can perform, there is one more important mechanic for the game to teach you: the hairball. Bubsy has always taken some degree of inspiration from Sonic, but 4D is where they really unleashed their inner hedgehog (Sorry, I played too much Bubsy, some of his wit must’ve rubbed off on me).
All jokes aside, if you were among the ranks of people who stood by Sonic Unleashed‘s day stages as some of the best 3D platforming that series ever had, then Bubsy 4D is the easiest recommendation ever. The hairball mechanic isn’t a direct replica of anything Sonic ever made, but it’s cut from the same cloth.
With the press of a button, Bubsy puffs into a hairball that changes your entire moveset. This time with more focus on fast traversal than vertical tricks. To start with, you’re given the option to freely toggle into and out of this mode, a jump button that makes you constantly bounce if held, a speed-up button, and a complete momentum halt.
As the game progresses, you can further expand your options while in hairball mode. You’re also likely to discover certain physics tricks you can pull off with it just by using it naturally throughout the game. Much of the game’s speedrunning skill set will rely on learning how to abuse it.
Mastering the Shun Goku Bubsy
The game’s tutorial does a good job of offering a space for players to try every ability as they explain it. It’s not exactly overwhelming, but it is a lot compared to some other platformers you may have tried. However, Bubsy 4D has even more in store for its players. For example, one of the collectibles hidden in every stage is a Blueprint: a reward for walking off the beaten path. What it does is, as Bubsy puts it, “buy something the kids stole from him”. The game doesn’t do subtlety when it comes to contextualizing its gameplay systems, but more on that later.
Upgrades range from entirely new moves to slight modifications and/or improvements to your existing kit. Throughout the game, you’ll amass an impressive list of commands, one which you can always check in-game through the paws pause menu. Now, to be honest, this isn’t as hard as it seems. The movelist contains every single action, including your base kit, which should be second nature after just a few minutes with the game. Case in point, there are a few upgrades that aren’t even used for platforming.
If you don’t want to feel overwhelmed, you can start with any of its QoL upgrades. A collectible finder, an extra life point, the ability to fast travel between checkpoints, being able to restore life by sitting in any bench, and no longer sliding downwards after clinging to a wall. After that, you can expand your repertoire with a drift mechanic for the hairball, other jump variations, a faster sprint, and other similar abilities. None of these ever feel mandatory to finish the game, but they’re always useful either for speedrunning or offering alternate methods for collecting certain hard-to-reach objects.
“I Wish There Were More of It” Is a Good Thing or a Bad Thing?
There’s plenty to dig into when it comes to understanding and mastering the movement system of Bubsy 4D. However, I do think the game suffers from a lack of playgrounds to do so. This is a game with 16 stages, counting the tutorial and bosses. Took me about 6 hours to get them all done, and I’m usually a slow, methodical player. Replayability may be a strong suit of the game, but variety is not.
The game spans over 3 different biomes, each one with a boss to cap it off. While each has its own gimmicks, much of what they do blends into one another. You have 150 yarn balls to collect in each stage, and one blueprint. The problem is that it’s rare that any of them will offer a challenge to find or gather. You’re likely to always stumble upon a blueprint if you do the most basic exploration across the level, and the 150 yarn balls are mostly just crumbs to tell you the paths you have to take.
It’s clear that the true challenge lies in the time attack, but the first “half” of the game spent playing as a regular collectathon feels underwhelming. You have many tools at your disposal, but oftentimes you have to slow down or use them methodically to ensure you’re not missing any yarn ball along the way.
Something about the pacing of the game feels slightly off. It’s not something that immediately strikes you as bad, but when you compare it with smaller titles like Bombun or Lunistice, it’s hard to shake off the feeling that there should be more to it. The game relies too much on its (admittedly great) movement system to keep you entertained.
A Mixed Bag of Decent Highs and Weird Lows
This dichotomy extends beyond just gameplay. Artistically, it’s a game that you can feel the effort put into it, but there are still a few quirks here and there. For example, cel-shading was a great choice as a baseline for the visuals; Bubsy never had a consistent style over the years, but Fabraz put forth their interpretation with confidence. The visuals perfectly blend modern design and just enough of a nostalgic look to capture that Dreamcast-era aesthetic.
Every character also had slight redesigns to accompany this vision, and I think it’s hard to disagree that they look better than ever. On the other hand, stages can often feel too saturated or overly reliant on “videogame logic”. A problem that’s exacerbated by the characters constantly lampshading that fact. There’s nothing wrong with making the level design take precedence over style, but Bubsy 4D sometimes teeters on the edge of acceptable.
As I said before, the game has 3 biomes. Each one has a distinct theme, but they all share a certain uncanniness that’s hard to put into words. Maybe that’s more of a personal issue, but before every time trial attempt, I had to try and ignore the environment as much as possible. Then I had to mentally map the best route I could find and use that as navigation while ignoring the visuals of the game. Navigating the world felt like I needed to “wash” certain aspects of it to be readable.
Even animations have certain moments where you’re like “oh, that’s a cool throwback to old platformers” and others where you’re wondering “wait, is that intentional, or is it just jank”? One such case in particular that bothered me was any time I talked with the NPCs in the hub. As soon as you press the button, all characters take a couple of seconds to move into a certain place where their animation plays out, and the interaction really begins.
Let me be clear, this is never an issue that interrupts the flow of the game. If you don’t have a tendency to overthink things, you’ll likely be far too entertained by the movement to care about these details. But if that fails, you’ll soon find yourself questioning where the line is between a B-tier aesthetic and classic videogame corner-cutting techniques.
Bubsy 4D Can Get a Bit Overzealous on the Self-Deprecating Humor
All in all, I would say that the only thing that can really disappoint someone in this game is how often it defaults back to certain tropes of self-deprecating humor. Some degree of it is definitely necessary to forge a memorable identity for Bubsy, but sometimes it’s a note that’s played too often. There’s no better example of this than Oblivia. It’s the first appearance of this character in a game, and a great opportunity to offer more variety in a series that used to focus purely on the bobcat’s blabbermouth tendencies. However, she’s mostly used as a sounding board for Bubsy’s antics instead, forced to be the comedic foil that has no room for personality other than being “constantly annoyed.”
The key here is just a lack of balance. Bubsy was finally allowed to be more than just a joke, but the jokes are still largely the same. You can see flashes of brilliance here and there throughout your journey, but they’ll be sandwiched by the formula of Bubsy making a pun or breaking the fourth wall and characters bemoaning in response. It’s a game that has enough tact to pull off a “Pilot’s license, what for” joke without being obnoxious, but still couldn’t deliver a charismatic cast like many of its inspirations did. Even though Bubsy’s curse was broken, there are still a few lingering effects from it that need to be dealt with.
Is Bubsy Really Back?
As someone who closely accompanies the video game industry and discourse, it’s hard to judge Bubsy 4D in a vacuum. An infamous franchise trudging along an incredibly competitive market and somehow surviving after a sea of bad-to-middling games makes for a charming story. Separating that from what the game truly is ends up being harder than it should be. Every praise and every criticism needs to pass through a filter of “would I say that for any game, or is the legacy of the IP adding weight to it?”
There’s plenty to love here. Fans of the genre would likely give it a try regardless, but those who longed for a more arcade experience with focus on tricks and speedrunning will find an absolute gem here. You might also feel like the base campaign is somewhat underwhelming for a collectathon. How you feel about the game will largely depend on which of these two aspects you value more.
At the end of the day, I think it’s fair to give Bubsy 4D its flowers. For once, it’s a game worth playing for what it is and not just for the memes. For me, however, there are still a few ways to go before I would call it a truly fantastic experience. It’s time for the bobcat to stop wondering what could go wrong and start workshopping how to do even better.
Disclaimer: Atari provided a PC (Steam) copy of Bubsy 4D for review purposes.
