Completion Time: 7h:32m:00s
Rating: 7/10

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Who Is Zapper?

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Zapper is a cricket, and boy is he wicked. He is also Frogger, but with way more attitude as illustrated by the cover art shown above. In a regular game of Frogger you avoid obstacles in order to rescue what I assume are your children, if not just rogue kids that belong to somebody else. But in Zapper, you only occasionally dodge obstacles, other times opting to use your electricity powers to kill enemies until they are dead. Even the goal of each stage is different, instead of saving baby crickets (larva?) you are destroying eggs laid by the primary antagonist Maggie the magpie. So a more violent version Frogger all around. The ultimate end goal here is to defeat Maggie and save your captured unnamed sibling from her clutches.

Zapper using his dear beloved brother to get better television reception

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Hop To It!

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The game has 4 worlds to zap your way through, each one is kinda themed, but they seem to lose track of that at times. World 1 is fairly standard, you're hopping across rocks in ponds and climbing tree stumps, World 2 is sort of like a logging camp in the trees until you start crossing bone bridges across lava chasms, and the 4th and final world is all techno focused as you make your way to the boss. I skipped World 3, because it is completely nonsensical and also my favorite of the bunch. You start out in an old west mining town that is also haunted, then you board a cyclopean monster train, before finally scaling a mountain and outrunning water buffalo. It sort of begs the question of how some of these level designs came about. They certainly run the gamut of boring to interesting at a breakneck speed.

Monster train is always watching

Across these worlds, you encounter snails, possessed statues, autonomous woodchippers, and gelatinous blobs that you have to either avoid entirely or murder with your electric powers. These aren't too bad, it's some of the stage puzzles that become a bit of a headache for me. When up in the trees in the logging facility, there are sections with turning cogs you have to hop on that can really mess with your idea of which way to hop. I leapt into the abyss here on more than one occasion. And don't even get me started on the mirror-laser world, where you have to bounce lasers around to charge up doors and bridges and things. I have never liked these sorts of puzzles, and I don't know that I ever will. Also, don't actually walk into the lasers or you'll be brutally sliced in half.

While Zapper's reflecting lasers, I'm reflecting on my choices

The actual controls are strange at times, often it feels like I'm moving too fast for Zapper to process. This led to botching puzzle execution and mistakenly grabbing golden orbs out of order, leading to me not getting the golden fly that would grant me access to a later bonus puzzle. Dying wouldn't usually reset this either, so what do you do? Restart the level. Thankfully with only 12 real levels to worry about, it at least didn't take too long overall.

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Completing the Game

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So once you get this far, there are a number of things to be considered when completing Zapper. As mentioned before, there are 4 worlds, each with 3 actual levels to make your way through. If you collect all 100 orbs in each of those individual levels (300 orbs total), then a 4th "bonus" level opens up. The gameplay in these ranges from dodging stingers in a beehive to preventing a mine from detonating, all the while collecting another 100 orbs. Much like the regular game, these only get harder as time goes on, with the final bonus level taking an eternity to complete. This is due to the fact that you have a mine circling around the perimeter of your person, meaning you have to time when and where your hopping lest the mine come into contact with an obstacle, blowing up and resetting your progress. I can't even begin to count the amount of times I had to attempt this.

A cricket and his bomb companion moments before disaster

So why go through this? Well, completing each bonus round will give you 400 total orbs per world, and presents the following unlockables:

• Insect Eye (8 of the same screen all at once)
• Screen Switch (Flips the stage to be mirrored)
• Auto-Hop (Automatic hopping?)
• Infinite Super Zap (Permanent powerful electric zaps)

If there was some replayability here this might be worth it, but as it stands they're just things to tinker with for a brief bit before turning the game off. Nothing game changing or revolutionary here.

The only other thing to address really are the Special stages, which automatically launch whenever you finish a stage with all orbs and every secret found. These stages have you hopping across disappearing platforms as fast as possible, collecting coins along the way. Occasionally an extra life or a shield will tempt those daring enough to stray from the path for instant gratification. If you make it to the end without falling to your death and collecting every coin along the way, you'll be given a hat which acts as a shield in the next area. This lasts so long as you don't get hit (or fall off a cliff and die or something). Nothing really to complete here, which is good because I fell to my death often during these stages due to the speed of the platforms, and the background stealing my focus away from the platforming at hand most of the time.

The game trying it's best to distract me

Zapper isn't perfect, it's a serviceable Frogger-like that attempts to get by on weirdness and their smarmy new mascot character always crossing his arms and raising his eyebrows. And for the most part I do think it works, aside from the final bonus stage taking forever to finish the game isn't too hard to complete and the only thing really hampering the game for me is that I wish he would hop as fast as I was providing button inputs. As it stands, I would recommend this to anyone looking for an early aughts mascot-driven Frogger-style platformer to quickly run through.

The face of a cricket who just knows he's getting a sequel

This is the first in an attempt to go through and complete every GameCube game, as it is the largest part of my video game collection. GameCube Games: 1/652