Joe Danger

As your soar majestically over the paddling pool filled with sharks you’ll notice that Joe Danger is a motorcycle stunt game. Where Trials HD conquered the marketplace with a more realistic slice of the motorcycle stunt world, Joe Danger takes a more colourful, light-hearted view of things – imagine Trials HD if it had been pissed on by a rainbow and you’d be somewhere close. Guildford based developers, Hello Games have worked long and hard on this title. I played it in October last year, but now it’s finally been released on the Playstation Network is it worth donning the bike leathers for?

Joe Danger is a shadow of his former self – he used to be a big-shot motorcycle stuntman but an accident cut short his career. Now he’s trying to prove to the world, and to himself, that he can do this. Within minutes of starting Joe Danger you can see why he does it – it’s as addictive as anything you have ever played and then some. It takes a very simple premise – get from one end of the track to the other – and makes everything between the start and finish lines fun. The controls are simple – the bottom bumper buttons control forward and reverse, while the top bumpers allow you to pull of mid-air stunts (hands free, superman… you know the score). You have a boost button and you can duck to get under low barriers. That’s all you need to know. It’s that simple. You just race from one end to the other trying to hit the level goals, and that’s where you’ll find yourself becoming addicted and desperate to pick up the subtleties of the controls – you can speed up and slow down in mid air (you’re even able to travel backwards) – essential skills to learn if you want to unlock everything this game has to offer.

In some cases the level is simple – race from one end to the other, do stunts. Stunts equal points and points equals trophies. But then you get other objectives – collect all the silver mini-stars in a level, land on every target in a level, complete the level in a certain time, combo the entire level (nightmare!!) – all these award you stars which you can then spend to unlock later levels, which you will need to do to progress. Some of these challenges require a massive level of skill to overcome,  not that you’ll realise, though, as you’ll be having too much fun playing the game to notice anything like that!

Joe Danger’s visuals are beautiful. The levels are finely crafted from colourful objects – ramps, buses, cars, springboards and the like, sit over three lanes. You can change lanes at switch gates and, depending which lane you’re in, either make the course harder or easier for yourself and when playing for the stars, help yourself achieve your goals. The whole game has a light, vibrant feel which helps to make the fact that you’ll spend countless hours playing it because of the “just one more go” factor a whole lot better.

Everything about the game is cheery, from the crowd egging you on to the smiley faces you’ll achieve for obtaining big air or a particularly awesome trick combo (that’s not including the smiley face you will have yourself at this point). Even the spinning obstacles have a smile on their face as they try to knock you off your bike and, no matter how many times it happens, it’s always fun to land Joe in a shark pool and watch him be pulled about as the fearsome predator grabs his legs.

The varied nature of the challenges means that this game has replayability in spades – it will take you a good while to get all the stars throughout the game. Particularly in the later levels where things start to get really tricky, and that’s before you enter into the friendly (read “bitter”) rivalry that comes from challenging your friends’ position on each of the leaderboards. If that’s still not enough you can take part in multiplayer races and even build your own courses in the sandbox. Building your own courses is not as daunting as it sounds and you’ll get the hang of it in no time thanks to the ability to stop a run and any point and slap in a new obstacle or, maybe more importantly, a landing ramp.  You can, as you would expect, share your creations with your friends, so, hopefully, there will be some insane custom tracks appearing fairly soon.