Gremlins 2: The New Batch (Game Boy Review)

Gremlins 2: The New Batch
Platform: Game Boy
Released December 20, 1990
Developed by Sunsoft
NEVER BEEN RE-RELEASED

I mean, it doesn’t look too bad, right? But actually Gremlins 2 is so bad that this became the first time since last May that I’m posting a review for a game I didn’t finish. Let’s coin a new phrase and say that Gremlins 2 on Gameboy is “Dynatron City levels of bad.”

It’s been almost two years since I gave a NO! to the semi-popular NES version of Gremlins 2. I know it has fans, but its awkward jumping and poor level design didn’t work for me. But, I’d rather be forced to play Gremlins 2 on the NES all day, every day for the rest of my life than be forced to spend another minute with the Game Boy version, also by Sunsoft. I don’t rage quit a lot of games these days. If a game becomes especially infuriating, I just use save states or even rewind to give me unlimited chances. For me to rage quit, I have to reach the point where I’m absolutely certain that the developers did not give the tiniest of squirts whether or not the game was fun, just as long as they were being trollish with game design just for the sake of it. With that said, Gremlins 2 is one of the worst Game Boy titles I’ve ever played, and it’s mostly owed to some of the most unintuitive use of springs I’ve encountered. The game is largely built around jumping off these, but the timing is pretty fickle. I never got the hang of it, and then came this part:

This is how the fourth and final level of the game begins, and without hyperbole, I spent twenty minutes rewinding and replaying trying to get past this. I never came even a little close. The springs don’t just send you flying up. You have to time when to press the button. That’s fine. Other games do that. Except the timing for Gremlins 2’s springs is so anal that it’s probably the shortest possible amount you can program on a Game Boy. Otherwise, you just fall off the spring. The challenge in the above screenshot is, within a literal fraction of a second, you have to activate the spring without falling off into the spike, move right, shimmy left, and land on the platform. You have to key this in perfectly to the microsecond, or you won’t make it. I fired up a full Longplay of it on Youtube and noticed even someone who apparently knew what they were doing could barely get past it. I tried and tried and tried, but then I glanced over at that video I cued up and noticed that, if I got past this literal start to the final stage, there were a lot more jumps like this ahead of me followed by a 100% blind jumping maze. F*ck you, Gremlins 2, I quit.

Gremlins 2 did exactly one thing that was kind of okay: these boxing glove blocks:

Which, logically, you have to design a convoluted situation with a basic enemy in order for them to work, but at least they’re satisfying to activate. I’m almost convinced they added these just to show their bosses that they had a vague notion of what “fun” resembles. They actually add nothing because there’s no way to improvise using them. The game just feeds you an enemy to kill whenever they pop up, and at most, you might have to scroll the screen a little to make it spawn, then retreat backwards and activate the glove. I think I just talked myself out of the boxing glove blocks being the one positive thing in the game. I really don’t think Gremlins 2 does anything right. I mean, I guess it looks fine, but when the game plays this poorly, what good is that?

For the bonus stages, you have ten seconds to hit that boxing bag 100 times to get a free life. With actual autofire on, I reached 100 literally as the timer ran out. Correct me if I’m wrong, but there was no way to do autofire on an original Game Boy, right? Jeez, Gremlins 2 is a game that never misses an opportunity to be cruel just for the sake of cruelty.

You know what? I don’t actually think the people behind this game were actually trying to make an enjoyable experience. Gremlins 2 is so bad and so disconnected from the films that it feels malicious. As if the game developers were Care Bear-like loveless villains plotting to make the children of the world suffer because they didn’t get enough hugs as kids themselves. Either that or the development team resented getting this assignment and resolved to make a terrible game out of spite. It’s not like everything else about Gremlins 2 was sublime. This is ALL bad. Your primary weapon is a pencil that you have to find at the start of every stage. It doesn’t carry over between levels. Logically a pencil would only be useful to stab enemies, but no, you bonk them on the head with it. You couldn’t swat a fly with a pencil, let alone kill a Gremlin with one, especially when its length barely extends beyond your own sprite. So, naturally most enemies take multiple shots to kill.

It goes like a single pixel further to the side than the last pixel of Gizmo’s ear. By the way, the bat gremlin drops three smaller bats that heat seek you, matching your movement perfectly. Sometimes, they will stop right above your head, but other times, it’s an outright unavoidable life slap.

Gremlins 2 is one of those games where you just have to accept damage again and again and hope that there’s a health drop or two in front of you. During a moving block sequence in the third stage, I tried over and over again to figure out how to ride the dang thing without being pushed off the platform by a spiky block and falling to my death, especially since it moves faster than I can jump and move. Apparently you need the tool box, but when *I* used the tool box, I lost it as soon as I took my first damage. Eventually I just decided to accept the loss of health and use the spikes as platforms. So, I didn’t finish Gremlins 2, which is fine because I’m pretty sure the developers didn’t either. This is the absolute worst Game Boy platformer I’ve reviewed so far. Granted, I haven’t done a lot, but I expected better from the studio that did the fairly decent Batman: The Video Game on Game Boy. I don’t even know why the people who made Gremlins 2 even wanted to be game designers if this is the type of garbage they wanted to produce. Hey jerkasses, you were making a game based on the film Gremlins, not Troll.
Verdict: NO!

Someone get Gizmo a stool softener.