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Comix Zone
Text Review
Sketch Turner is a comic artist and freelance rock musician when one night, during a lightning storm, he finds himself trapped inside his own comic. With the villain of his book, a mutant named Mortus, now drawing the book, Sketch has to fight his way through the Comix Zone to prevent himself from becoming flesh and bone.
Calling Comix Zone a unique game would be an understatement. Set inside a living world of comic books, Comix Zone takes an ordinary side scrolling platforming beat ‘em up and makes it interesting. Enemies are often literally drawn in by the hand of Mortus, and the dialogue appears as word bubbles. On top of this, the gameplay takes place inside the panels of a comic book giving you glimpses of upcoming areas and sometimes tearing away when you hit an enemy into a particularly weak panel border. These panels often also give you multiple paths to progress through a given page; when a panel is complete, flashing arrows will show you the available routes, and Sketch will swing himself over the borders and/or otherwise crawl through holes in the page.
But for all the cleverness of the gameplay and graphics, Comix Zone is at its core a maddeningly difficult game. After completing the first chapter, you are given two chances to complete each of the two subsequent chapters. Die and you get sent back to the first panel of the page. Die again and it’s game over, and you have to start from the beginning. But more frustrating is the fact that hitting inanimate objects drains health away from Sketch. It’s frustrating because the game is riddled with inanimate objects that block your progress. Collectible items can be used to circumvent said obstacles, but it still seems like a punishment for trying to move forward.
The game is also short, just three chapters of two pages each. This is obviously a mixed blessing; the game is hard enough without making it longer. Still, the world is interesting enough that it seems unfair that it is so short when some difficulty balancing and perhaps a password or save system would have made it better.
Despite its shortcomings Comix Zone is one of the more unique and interesting games of the 16-bit era and is definitely worth checking out.
- Brian Easton
Developer: Sega Technical Institute
Publisher: Sega
Platform(s): PC, Sega Genesis, Virtual Console, XBLA
Calling Comix Zone a unique game would be an understatement. Set inside a living world of comic books, Comix Zone takes an ordinary side scrolling platforming beat ‘em up and makes it interesting. Enemies are often literally drawn in by the hand of Mortus, and the dialogue appears as word bubbles. On top of this, the gameplay takes place inside the panels of a comic book giving you glimpses of upcoming areas and sometimes tearing away when you hit an enemy into a particularly weak panel border. These panels often also give you multiple paths to progress through a given page; when a panel is complete, flashing arrows will show you the available routes, and Sketch will swing himself over the borders and/or otherwise crawl through holes in the page.
But for all the cleverness of the gameplay and graphics, Comix Zone is at its core a maddeningly difficult game. After completing the first chapter, you are given two chances to complete each of the two subsequent chapters. Die and you get sent back to the first panel of the page. Die again and it’s game over, and you have to start from the beginning. But more frustrating is the fact that hitting inanimate objects drains health away from Sketch. It’s frustrating because the game is riddled with inanimate objects that block your progress. Collectible items can be used to circumvent said obstacles, but it still seems like a punishment for trying to move forward.
The game is also short, just three chapters of two pages each. This is obviously a mixed blessing; the game is hard enough without making it longer. Still, the world is interesting enough that it seems unfair that it is so short when some difficulty balancing and perhaps a password or save system would have made it better.
Despite its shortcomings Comix Zone is one of the more unique and interesting games of the 16-bit era and is definitely worth checking out.
- Brian Easton
Developer: Sega Technical Institute
Publisher: Sega
Platform(s): PC, Sega Genesis, Virtual Console, XBLA
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