Futurama (Game) Review

The PlayStation 2 and Xbox are home to many different licensed games from that time. One of the games that seems to get lost in the shuffle sometimes is Futurama. This game came out right near the time the show was canceled. It had a limited print run and is considered one of the rarest games on PS2 and Xbox. I don’t even remember seeing this one in stores back then, and I always wanted to play it once I learned about it. Find out below if it was worth the wait in our Futurama (Game) Review!

Story

The story in Futurama plays out like an episode of the show, with cutscenes before and after each level to tie everything together. The game starts with Professor Farnsworth selling Planet Express to Mom. This is due to the company losing money for years because of mismanagement. This, unfortunately, allows Mom to enslave humanity since this transaction gave her over 50 percent ownership of Earth. She eventually captures Farnsworth as she needs him to turn Earth into a gigantic spacecraft. This leads Fry, Leela, and Bender on an adventure to save Earth and prevent all of this from happening in the first place. It’s a bit of a stretch, but hey, it’s Futurama. It doesn’t have to make perfect sense.

Presentation

Futurama looks very good on original hardware and even better with upscaled textures in an emulator. It really feels like you’re playing an episode of the show. The HUD elements have an animated feel, and the graphics complement the characters’ style nicely while adding a 3D effect that was popular at the time. The explosions and lighting look somewhat out of place as they’re a bit more realistic than they should be. They look great, but they just don’t fit with the art style. There’s some nice variety in most of the levels. There are sewers, city areas, caves, swamps, and more. They tried to make it a well-rounded experience, and I think they succeeded.

Check out our full playthrough right here!

The voice acting is fantastic, and the cutscenes feel like you’re just watching the show. They actually made a 30-minute episode of the game in 2008, but it’s not considered canon. The one-liners during gameplay don’t get as repetitive as some games in the genre. Enemies even add in their own quips here and there to keep things light. It felt like the developers really tried to make the game as close to the show as possible. The music sounds like remixed versions of the show’s scores. It serves as good background music, but it’s nothing too memorable. It looks and sounds like Futurama, and that’s about all you can ask for.

Gameplay

General Gameplay

If you’ve played any licensed platformer before, you know what to expect from Futurama. You’re going to be blasting, punching, and kicking your way through 22 different levels. Each level has collectibles in the form of Nibblers trapped in cages, which unlock loading screen art, music, and cutscenes in the menu. There are individual character collectibles (ex., Robobium for Bender) that give you an additional life once 25 are collected. Ammo and health pickups are scattered around levels, as well as a charge bubble for Bender and Leela’s special attacks.

There is a ton of precision platforming. This is made much more difficult by abysmal collision detection and imprecise jumping controls. It got so bad for me that I questioned whether I’d finish the game on the second level, because I kept touching goo I wasn’t trying to hit while jumping. This is easily the game’s biggest weakness because, a lot of times, it feels like making a jump is purely a matter of luck. It didn’t get any better as I went along. In fact, I had to redo one portion of a Leela level over a dozen times! It turned out to be an issue where the game wasn’t registering the ability to pull up on a ledge, even though there was plenty of room to do so. Infuriating.

Fry

You begin Futurama playing as Fry. He has a blaster to start and can find some other weapons, like a shotgun and a Tommy gun. The AI in his levels was really unforgiving. I had to tiptoe into every room because if I didn’t, someone would pop out from the other side of the wall and shoot me before I could even aim at them. It doesn’t help that every enemy is an absolute bullet sponge, either. He does get to drive a chicken walker in New New York, which was a nice change of pace. Fry is also playable in the last level of the game, where he has to fight the Destructor in a relatively quick final boss fight.

Bender

Bender has a spin attack and a stomp attack, and his levels felt like the least memorable to me. A lot of them felt very similar, and he had some very frustrating platforming sections. One of his more memorable sections is when he has to outrun a boulder in a level reminiscent of Crash Bandicoot. Bender shows up again at the end of the game in his portion of the final act, where he has to fight some mini-bosses.

Leela

Leela was by far the most fun to play with, combat-wise. She has a superb spin-kick special move that takes out everyone within a small radius. It’s pretty fun to do backflips and rolls that are incorporated into some of her platforming sequences as well. The thing I didn’t like about Leela’s levels was their reliance on annoying memory puzzles. She had some formidable kamikaze enemies as well, who were hard to get away from. Leela has to run around looking for keycards in her part of the final act, which was probably easier than most of her normal levels.

Zoidberg

There is a nice nod to Zoidberg later in the game as the character is playable in exactly one level. You don’t really play as Zoidberg, though. Instead, you’re guiding him on a “horse” to get to a generator. It’s a tough level that is hard to get through without a bunch of trial and error, and the collision detection sucks worse here than in any other part of the game. You’ll die from hitting thin air at times. It’s that bad. Luckily, the level is fun to play through, even if you have to retry it a few times. There are checkpoints here that make it easier to get through. It was a fun change of pace.

Final Thoughts

Futurama is a love letter to the show in presentation, story, and cutscenes. The developers did a good job staying faithful to the source material with so many little details included throughout the game. Unfortunately, the gameplay doesn’t quite live up to the hype. It’s very much playable, but a lot more frustrating than I expected for a game like this. Hits don’t register, jumps don’t land how you expect them to, characters are twitchy, and the camera can be a pain. It’s hard to recommend this to anyone but a hardcore Futurama fan.