The Simpsons Game

You gotta love a game that takes great relish in calling out stock gaming bits like the double-jump or token lava level while parodying franchises like EverQuest and Katamari. But does using the same medium that you’re both honoring and goofing on make those same clichés in your gameplay more gloriously self-aware than wearily tired? The Simpsons Game raises exactly that question by making what is typically run-of-the-mill rote — like forcing players to run through the game-muscle-memory motions of having to collect umpteen different objects — outrageously clever. But even all the self-referential smarty-pants-ness doesn’t necessarily condone its missteps.

Built as a series of “episodes” wrapped around the hub world of Springfield, The Simpsons Game is as meta as it gets. As any of the four main family members, you can choose to simply tool around the wide-open town or hop into more scripted episodes. Most of the different challenges call upon different abilities of the Simpsons clan — Bart is the superhero Bartman, with a grapple hook and the skills to use updrafts to float higher; Lisa stuns foes with her sax and can go into “Zen mode” (an overlord view in which she can pick up and place items on the map); Homer can burp, bloat, and float; and Marge can rally troops of NPCs with her bullhorn.

The variety is duly engaging, and boy, is it inventive — like a Will Wright–as-nerdy-villain level and Madden footballers as whiny enemies. But ultimately, all the slyness in the world can’t hide some of the “fighting in a pool of Jell-o” feel of hand-to-hand combat, or the fact that the loose, manually controllable camera often leaves you in a desperate lurch. And as ingenious as some of the episode premises are (Milhouse as the King of All Cosmos? Absolutely incredible!), they invariably devolve into collect-a-thons and punching fests. This game has literally hundreds of collectible bits and bobs for those who want to scour for trophies and unlockables (like new character-costumes) — as well as the ability to play co-op through every episode with a friend (offline). The Simpsons Game is no lightweight in the quantity department.

And most important, for those of you who delight in the actual television series — it gets no better than this. The Simpsons Game is witty and well-written, and it intelligently plays into the nerdy sensibilities of gamers; really, only the by-the-numbers gameplay sometimes comes up short. But even that shouldn’t stand in the way of cheeky humorists and Simpsons-holics.