I know I’m a couple of months late to the party, and I have to admit that I avoided covering the BK games when they came out because I didn’t expect much out of them and certainly didn’t expect them to sell millions of copies, but now I’ll eat some crow and give them the coverage they deserve. One benefit of waiting is that I was able to just buy all three off of Half.com for about $2 each and didn’t ever have to actually go to BK. If you haven’t already played them, check out Half.com or eBay or your favorite videogame trading site to find your own copies. Even though the games aren’t great, you’ll be getting some nice Xbox 360 game replacement cases for fairly cheap. And you get a few hundred easy gamerscore points along with it, so I’d say they are worth picking up.
Sneak King: Of the three BK games, this is the one that really screams “THIS IS A BURGER KING AD” at you for every single second you play it. The other games are much more subtle and just feature characters from the BK commercials, but Sneak King injects a specific menu items into the game and every mission outline is an ad telling you how delicious that particular food item you are delivering is. You feel like a corporate tool when you are playing Sneak King.
As far as the gameplay itself, it isn’t completely horrible, but it could have been better. The idea is that you are The King, and you have to sneak around the levels and deliver food to hungry people. It is a rather funny idea, and you can get into a lot of funny situations, but everything happens so slowly that you’ll tire of the game fairly quickly. When you want to use a hiding place, the animation getting in and getting out is insanely slow. Also, when you give food to people, The King has to do a little dance each and every single time, which gets old fast. I’m also not fond of the camera system as it can be very hard to keep a good view on your surroundings, and it is very hard to see when you are in a hiding place, which sort of defeats the purpose of using them at all. Sneak King is sort of fun, but it could have been a lot better.
Big Bumpin’: Big Bumpin’ is a bunper car game that sports some halfway decent graphics but has lame gameplay. I always thought that the appeal of riding bumper cars was the actual bumping into other people and the whiplash, but I guess the developers here thought differently. You can’t, of course, translate these feelings into a videogame, and the result is really shallow and lame. There are different events that have you play hot potato by bumping into others, or simply trying to do as much damage as possible to be the last man standing, but none of it is all that fun. One event that does stand out, however, is hockey. Two teams of two cruise around a hockey rink and try to score goals. It is insanely well put together and addictive and fun and is actually a blast to watch other people play because it can be very exciting. Honestly, if the whole game was just bumper car hockey instead of the other stuff, this would be the absolute best $3.99 game ever. But, that isn’t the case, so instead it is just another average title.
PocketBike Racer: PocketBike Racer takes the BK characters and puts them on little pocketbikes for a little kart racing action. If you have played Mario Kart, you know exactly what to expect here. Once you figure out the controls and learn the layout of the maps, this game is actually quite fun. There are some annoyances because you can get stuck on objects on the track, but once you get everything figured out there is actually a lot of fun to be had in PocketBike Racer. It is easily the best overall game of the three BK games, and the one I would recommend if you only want to pick one of these titles up.
