Spy Fox In: Cheese Chase

Their point and click games are great. This is just an expanded mini-game that would be better placed within one of their other titles.

[b]‘Cheeseball.’[/b] I dreaded replaying this so that I could fairly review it, but I was relieved when it was less boring than I remembered. [i]Cheese Chase[/i] is the first (and better) of the two [i]SPY Fox[/i] spin-offs. The plot is very simple: somebody stole a priceless hunk of cheese, and SPY Fox has to pursue her in any way that he can. There are vehicles with four corresponding environments: the moped for the urban as well as rural landscapes, the jetski for the watery ones, the snowmobile for the snowy landscapes, and an aeroplane for the desert skies. Gameplaywise, there are some subtle differences between these environments, but otherwise they feel nearly identical. The gameplay is very similar to [i]Spy Hunter[/i] (fittingly enough): as a vertical sidescroller, you have to keep your vehicle away from obstacles and smash any goons who try to inhibit you. Collecting fresh cheese increases your score, but grabbing spoilt cheese decreases it. The weapons that you can collect consist of plungers, bananas, and pies, but functionally it is hard to tell them apart. The goons consist drivers who try to ram you off of the path, but aside from differing in size, they all behave identically and have neither ranged attacks nor other strategies besides ramming into you. Although they can be annoying in swarms, dealing with them is usually easy. At first the campaign is good: the designers introduce the challenges to you map by map, which keeps the gameplay from feeling too repetitive. As you get halfway through the campaign and return to earlier environments, though, it becomes apparent that they were running out of ideas, and they compensated by simply inflating the difficulty: more goons to handle, more obstacles to avoid, narrower paths, and so forth. Eventually, you run into maps that require a nearly surgical level of precision to pass, because some of the obstacles have unexpectedly large hitboxes and they show up in ridiculously small paths. Since you’ll be crashing a lot in these maps (unless you have ninja reflexes), you’ll become either frustrated or bored redoing them over and over. It is a good thing that extra lives become absurdly plentiful late in the campaign, though. There are one hundred levels, but they are all short and you can finish them all in about three hours. The sound is generally unremarkable. Most of the sound effects are generic cartoony ones, coupled with more mundane sounds like engine noises. The voice acting is sporadic, but adequate. The music is where the sound shines, as it consists of several competent, spy-themed tracks. That being said, most of the tracks are oddly chill, which is quite an awkward fit for the intense situations. The graphics are the same cartoony yet charming aesthetic that you’ll recognise elsewhere in this series. The environments, objects, models, and so on are largely adequate. The only real problem is in the desert levels, where it is hard to tell what is an obstacle and what is harmless décor, creating needless frustration as you crash unexpectedly. There are also maps where it is possible to take a path only to quickly realise that you just went into a dead end, but these moments are mercifully rare. In the end, I am giving [i]Cheese Chase[/i] a very cautious recommendation: it is mildly entertaining for a while, but halfway through the campaign you’ll feel a want of variation, and I can understand why I became bored playing it the first time around. Buy it as part of either the Spy Fox Complete Pack or the Humongous Entertainment Complete Pack; it is only barely worth buying alone when on sale, and it is by no means the best possible way to introduce yourself to the [i]SPY Fox[/i] series either.