Genre : Action/Adventure
Publisher: Activision
Developer: Edge of Reality
Release Date: February 18, 2004

Buy 'PITFALL: The Lost Expedition': Xbox | GameCube| PlayStation 2

Pitfall: The Lost Expedition is the latest game in one of the oldest series in gaming history. Pitfall Harry has been dodging traps and jumping over crocodiles since the Atari 2600, and The Lost Expedition brings him up into the age of the modern platformer.

At the start of his newest adventure, in June of 1935, Harry's on his way to Peru to explore a newly discovered temple, as are quite a few other archeologists. Bad weather hits, and the plane goes down. Harry, being Harry, tosses the last parachute to the girl he was just hitting on, Nicole McAllister. Fortunately, he has the good luck to be thrown clear of the wreck.

Now all he has to do is rescue the rest of the explorers, outwit his old enemy Jonathan St. Claire, help Nicole find her missing father, survive near-constant attacks from both angry natives and hostile wildlife, and find a way back to civilization.

Somewhere in the middle of all this, Harry will also wind up rolling up his sleeves and slugging it out with a jaguar god, but we'll find out more about that when we get there.

Pitfall is about half 3D platformer, half exploratory adventure game a la Super Metroid. Harry is equipped with a double-jump and a small arsenal of martial-arts moves, including the mightiest spin-kick in the world and a pretty good right hook, but as you move through the Peruvian jungles, you'll constantly run into obstacles you can't circumvent: spider webs, hot coals, spiked columns, high ledges, and so on.

By rescuing other explorers, unearthing sacred idols, and trading those idols to the sleeping native shamans, you can earn the tools and skills you'll need to get further into the jungle. Harry can learn special moves from the handy Adventurer's Handbook, pages from which have become scattered across the jungle, and can pick up a few handy items here and there, such as a shield, gas mask, sling, pickaxe, or canteen.

In between circumventing obstacles, Pitfall is something like forty percent fighting to sixty percent platforming. The fights are simple enough; using Harry's fists, or occasionally his sling, your job is to stun or defeat enemies ranging from coconut-chucking natives to angry king gorillas to the stink-bomb-hurling "Renegade" tribesmen.

You'll also have to worry about St. Claire's mercenaries, a bunch of glass-jawed Australians who are nonetheless hideously accurate with thrown bundles of dynamite, and, oh yeah, the aforementioned angry leopard god.

(One thing that strikes me as strange is that the mercenaries are tossing around high explosives, and yet, they are nowhere near as dangerous as an angry porcupine. The porcupines are indeed vicious - you can't punch them, for obvious reasons, and they've got this knack of tossing a spray of quills at you at the worst possible moment - but you'd think the guys with the bombs would be a bigger problem. This is one of those "only in video games" moments, I guess.)

The platforming is strangely… I want to use the word "traditional," but that wouldn't make any sense. Five years ago is not a "tradition." A good word for it might be "unadorned."

A lot of 3D platformers these days have a quirk or hook, so in addition to jumping over bottomless pits every six seconds, you're running along walls like a ninja, or transforming into a really scary version of yourself, or cleaning slime off walls with a weird-looking water cannon, or something. Pitfall doesn't really bother with any of that. Harry's jumping will change over the course of the game as he's taught new moves, such as the Heroic Dive, but he's still just jumping.

Harry tends to rely on vines to get around, though, and nine times out of ten, you'll need to figure out some creative way to use a vine to get yourself where you want to go. Since Harry has a full range of motion while he's on whatever he's swinging on - although controlling his orientation with the left thumbstick is awfully imprecise - you can take a look around, and see if there's some less obvious ledge you can use this vine to reach.

The rest of the game is stuff we've all seen before, strung together into new and occasionally vicious forms. Pitfall starts slowly, in the jungles around the crash site, but by the time you've gotten up into the mountains, or into the ruined cities that form the final stages of the game, you'll see some really excellently vicious traps and gauntlets that have to be run. Spiked floors, moving elevators, conveyor belts, crushing ceilings (well, sort of), angry crocodiles as makeshift platforms, monkeys bouncing around your chosen route, ancient Peruvian traps, electric eels, icy floors, flame jets, collapsing floors, and the occasional puzzle all put in their appearances, and the further you get into the game, the more of these you'll start seeing in a single room. It would've been nice to see one platformer that didn't bother with the "fire level/ice level" trope, but what the hell; it breaks up the monotony of the jungle.

For the most part, Harry can navigate these environments without a problem. The game does have a problem once in a while with seemingly random floor polygons; on virtually any platform with even a slight curve to it, you've got as good a chance of sliding off as you do of landing safely. If you want to jump to any given surface, unless it's perfectly flat, you'll have to have near-perfect aim to avoid sliding off. This is particularly irritating when you're trying to leap from crocodile to crocodile, and also rears its ugly head occasionally when you're swinging from vine to vine. It gets weirder when you encounter certain columns, which are made up of stacks of smaller platforms, and Harry starts visibly stuttering in place as the game frantically tries to make up its mind as to whether that's a wall or a ledge.

The controls are otherwise fairly solid, with a couple of weird idiosyncrasies. Pitfall's camera is fully controlled by the player with the trigger buttons, and deals with the issue of obscuring the player's vision by turning surrounding objects transparent. For the most part, this is a great system, but it doesn't always work as well as you'd think. I've had a few problems with the game turning the next ledge I needed invisible, leaving me suspended precariously in midair wondering what in the hell I was supposed to do next.

The other thing worth mentioning is that Pitfall does a lot of weird things with the right thumbstick. Unequipped, it's Harry's "take" button; you press the stick towards something you want Harry to pick up. If he has an item in his hands, holding the stick up will generally activate it. It takes a lot of getting used to, especially if, like me, you've been playing a lot of games which map the camera spin to the right stick. Going from Pitfall to Nightshade and back again is not a very good idea.

A further oddity about Pitfall is that Harry, unlike a lot of platformer protagonists these days, can shrug off just about anything. As long as you can see the ground, Harry can jump down to it without injury (assuming, of course, that the ground itself isn't hazardous; just because you can see lava doesn't mean it's not gonna hurt). Even if you do fall into a bottomless pit, Harry will come flying out of it a second later, to land on the last permanent ledge he was standing on. It's probably not doing him any favors, psychologically speaking, but all you stand to lose from a botched jump is one tick off your healthbar.

Since there are fountains full of magical healing water all over the place, and you can carry a fair amount of that same water around in Harry's canteen, long platforming sequences are often less intense and more frustrating. The stakes aren't quite as high as they are in, say, Prince of Persia. For more casual players, this is a godsend, but I almost feel like I'm cheating. It's like using the no-falling code in Mega Man 3 or something.

Each new area, from the thickest rainforests to the most dilapidated ruins, brings with it a new set of challenges, traps, and enemies. The game can get frustrating, but it doesn't get monotonous, or boring; while Pitfall does have a near-fetishistic tendency to put you up against something that'll eat Harry, whether it's a piranha or crocodile or strange demon pit monster thing, the environments in which they eat Harry are, at the very least, distinctive. There's a lot of extraneous flash, like really lush-looking greenery, prairie dogs and butterflies that scatter as Harry approaches. The only sore spot in the game's environments is the water, which doesn't look like it's a fluid, but rather some kind of gelatinous matrix, perhaps blue raspberry gelatin, with alligators in it.

Harry himself, and all the characters in the game, are animated in a cartoonish style, sort of like what would happen if Sid and Marty Kroft teamed up with Don Bluth: big heads with spindly little bodies and expressive faces, with no cel-shading anywhere. (It was about time for that fad to die out anyway.) Harry runs around with big broad strides, falling, punching, kicking, getting hit, and occasionally distorting with the bonelessness of a career Warner Brothers 'toon. I dare anyone not to get a chuckle out of Harry's animation for descending a ladder, or the facial expression he gets when someone he's talking to does something stupid. The only exception is the color scheme; Harry looks like he's been dead for a couple of days, or, failing that, like a computer programmer. He's just way too pale.

The sound effects match the cartoonish flavor of the rest of the game, with all the boings, thuds, thwacks, and booms you could ask for. The music, on the other hand, is forgettable, like someone tried to bite John Williams' style and didn't do that great a job of it. The game's already a rather self-conscious Indiana Jones parody/homage; we didn't really need somebody playing a vaguely off-tempo version of the "Indiana Jones March" every time we find a sacred idol.

That's a mild concern, though, as are most of the problems I have with Pitfall. It's a solid platformer by any stretch of the imagination, with enough challenge to keep you busy for a while.

It is, however, lacking a bit of polish, and those extra touches that differentiate a good platformer from a great one. Harry's corpselike pallor, Harry's (very well-written) journal entries occasionally jumping the gun and spoiling the next few minutes of the game, forgettable music, the problems with slanted surfaces, and the weird controls all add up, and detract from the overall product to some extent.

Finally, Pitfall's main game is very short, as I blazed through it in seven hours. While it does have a few secrets, such as the ability to play as Nicole and the unlockable Pitfall games you can find in a shrine near your starting point (complete with a giant Mayan monument to the Atari 2600), Pitfall is still a bit on the brief side. It's not a bad buy for serious platformer fans, but more casual gamers would have to do some looking to find a better rental.

Score : 8.7/10