[b]‘No One Lives Forever.’[/b]
Humongous Entertainment has wrapped up the trilogy with the vulpid’s most ambitious sequel yet, and while it is nothing revolutionary, it is a good last step for the series.
The antagonist in [i]“Operation Ozone”[/i] is the most outrageous one that I have seen in [i]SPY Fox[/i]: a businessowner so immensely arrogant that she is willing to destroy the earth’s ozone layer just so that she can market more sunscreen. It is all too tempting to suggest that there is some politico-economic commentary underneath this awfully prescient plot, but whether that was intentional or not is another matter. Either way, it fits the stereotypical Saturday morning cartoon mould well.
Most of the characters that SPY Fox meets are new, and if you never tried any of the previous entries, you’ll have no trouble making sense of the story here. New characters include an almost lifeless bowling alley manager, a timid scientist critical to the mission, a bizarre owner of an antiques store, an ambitious worker for a doughnut/pizza shop, and so on. None of the characters is deep, but they are distinguishable and fine for what they are. Many of the jokes are cringeworthy puns unlikely to amuse an ordinary adult, but there were a few other jokes that made me laugh.
Unlike earlier adventures, this sequel has the most locations of the trilogy: North America, South America, Africa, and Eurasia. Although this sounds impressive, in actuality you only get to explore tiny segments of each continent. Even so, it makes for a relatively diverse environment, showing us that Humongous wanted to do something special for this sequel.
As with the earlier adventures, this sequel is easy — maybe even the easiest [i]SPY Fox[/i] to date. There are no mindnumbingly cryptic challenges, but there are a few weird ones, like the one where the protagonist has to sneak a prickly pear past a guard. While it did stump me for several minutes, it did not take ridiculously long for me to put two and two together as I reexamined the backgrounds. In another case where I was stuck, all that I had to do was explore another continent before I figured out what I was supposed to try. Almost everything else is smooth sailing.
I remember feeling a little overwhelmed at the beginning of the adventure, but it only took me two hours to finish it, and I could recomplete it in less than a quarter of that time. As always, Humongous programmed different challenges to appear in the adventure every time that you replay it, which greatly adds to the replayability, so do not let the brief running time discourage you.
Most of the sequel’s problems are the usual suspects, though: [url=https://tcrf.net/Spy_Fox:_Operation_Ozone]content that goes unused partly due to erroneous programming[/url], and subtitles are once again English-only. The only new issue is how slow the interface feels: if SPY Fox has a lot of stuff in his inventory, it can take a few seconds for his Super deep SPY pocket to unfold them all, which can grow tedious when you misclick or apply the wrong item. These are all minor issues, but it is unlikely that anybody is going to officially update this software to address them, which is a bummer.
The sound effects are the same cartoon clichés that we know from previous entries, but they are fine. The voice actors, likewise, all performed adequately (if unremarkably), though some may be disappointed to hear that Gina Nagy (who voiced Monkey Penny) is absent from this sequel. The music is more impressive: there is a diverse plenitude of tracks in this and they are all competent, though I would hesitate to call any of them catchy.
The graphics likewise get the job done: the characters all look fine, but they still suffer from the edgy pixels and want of detail that I mentioned in my other reviews. The backgrounds fare much better, and as always there are plenty of clickpoints that you can activate if you mistake something for a relevant object or merely want to watch the little spectacles unfold. Visual glitches are rare: I noticed that half of SPY Fox’s body repeatedly disappeared as he stared at the small body of water in North America, but other than that the visuals work like they should.
[i]“Operation Ozone”[/i] is another good children’s adventure game and worth getting alone for $7, but even so I strongly advise you to get this as part of the Spy Fox Complete Pack instead as most of the games therein are also worth trying. Knowing that this may well end up being the last official [i]SPY Fox[/i] title that we’ll get can make the experience a little saddening, but I don’t regret a single minute that I spent on this adventure.
