Comix Zone is a 1995 game for the Sega Genesis developed and published by Sega. It stars Sketch Turner, a comic artist, who ends up inside his newest comic Comix Zone after a freak lightning strike makes him swap places with the main villain Mortus who now seeks to kill him and become real himself.
Loading up the game definitely peaks your interest, not only is the Sega chant unique but you’re met with quite a cool picture of Sketch Turner in the background. The music is pretty decent too although thats to be expected of a comic book game.
As for options there is a jukebox to listen to the music and controls with the former being self explanatory but the controls being rather unique. Essentially the game had was built with both 3 button controls and 6 button controls in mind. If you had a 6 button controller you could use all 3 items whenever you want via the top buttons and had to block manually while if you only had a 3 button controller you’d use C to go between items while Sketch would auto block. Since I was using an emulator I obviously went 6 buttons.
Getting into the game I was surpised at how nice the graphics were although there were a few parts that had aged, the music was still quite good though. There was a surprising amount of talking from NPC’s but luckily you can skip most of it if ou’ve already seen it. As for controls they were quite easy to use with quite a variety of attacks and items to use although some people may accidentally (start to) use the paper plane attack which is powerful but costs health and can hit you as well. On top of that hitting breakable objects like barrels slightly hurts you too although the paper plane kills everything it hits so it can be used strategically.
Other than that the first impressions were quite good, enemies weren’t too hard or easy with fights actually looking cool and the effects of going between panels was really nice too although its there where you kinda wish the game would be remade, it’d be awesome to see a 3D-ish remake where it looks like its on actual pages with the outside parts being done in 3D (so Sketch’s Apartment and Mortus for example).
From what I can remember the game isn’t actually that long but it can be quite difficult especially with a few of the areas and the bosses who are interesting although there was one area in particular that was just a bit bullshit. Essentially there’d be a huge pool of lava with a switch on the other side and if you didn’t think of getting the knife before said area you 100% cannot complete it and have to die. In fact if you enabled God Mode jumping in the lava locks you into the jumping animation and you can’t get out so you have to restart the whole game. There’s also the question mark items that have a chance of blowing up too although they can just be ignored.
It is really satisfying when you do get past each of the panels though however I do not really know what to think of the end, essentially you’re suddenly thrown a time limit in the last boss against Mortus and if you don’t win fast enough you get a bad ending. Although I do have to admit the good ending is definitely worth the extra effort even if its honestly not much.
Overall Comix Zone is still quite an enjoyable game and can be quite a challenge on your first few attempts. I personally would love to see it remade with better graphics and perhaps even with additional content (2 player could possibly work).
0% Imagination 