Foto Face: The Face Stealer Strikes Review
Augmented Reality is a term that’s been floating around a lot lately. It boils down to being a gimmick that stems from virtual reality, only instead of putting a user into a virtual environment it brings a virtual item into the real world, via a viewscreen of some sort (of course). Using the DSi, mega-publisher Electronic Arts has found a middle ground to tread with their first entry to the downloadable DSiWare market. Foto Face: The Face Stealer Strikes is a relatively run-of-the-mill platformer that inserts a player’s likeness to great, if not repetitive, effect.
As soon as you boot up the title, players will be asked to pose for 5 photos representing 5 emotions: mouth closed (idle), happy, mouth open, angry and surprised. Once the face pics have been stored, they’ll be asked to record 5 voices: happy, evil laugh, injured, surprise and anger. The concept isn’t all that new, World Series of Poker: Tournament of Champions could use the Xbox 360 camera to capture a DigiMask™ for your in-game character. Even still, there’ something pretty novel about seeing your own face on the hero (and villain), not to mention hearing your own grunts and growls as you jump and fight your way through the levels.
The graphics aren’t the cleanest in the world. Characters are on the jagged side, but fit the theme of the level you’re playing in. Levels themselves are your typical platform and lever scattered affair with the occasional elevator or ladder to traverse. They are pleasing to look at though, done in a very cartoony style reminiscent of Team 17’s Worms franchise. Having your face (or the face of anyone who will hold still long enough for the photos) actually detracts a bit because of the low resolution of the camera and the fact that it’s shrunk down considerably to fit on the characters.
The sound is about a typical as you’d expect. Recording ones own sounds for the character emotes will have you laughing (try recording an expletive instead of “ow” for the injury effect) for a long time. Otherwise weapon and item collection sounds are pretty plain and forgettable.
As I said, gameplay is nothing special. Players make their way from one end of the map to the other (horizontally, vertically or both) defeating a smattering of enemies in one of 8 costumes that offer different abilities. The trouble is that the costumes themselves don’t offer much. It’ll come down to whether you need a speedster to make longer jumps and either a projectile weapon (a gun) or a melee weapon like (club, sword). Speaking of jumping… good luck. The longer jumps can be a manic chore, particularly if requiring timed precision. There’s seems to be an amount of “slide” for the speedster suits that are unfortunately necessary for making the jump in the first place.
Aside from the finite number of star collectibles (that don’t have much of a purpose anyway) there are power-ups to be had, but save for a “star magnet” pickup, I didn’t find any of them all that effective. Not so much anyway that I wanted to go out of my way to pick them up.
Finally, and I’m a little sad to say it, the best part of the game also tends to be the worst. For each and every new character, friend or enemy, that a player encounters during the game, they will be prompted to customize the faces and sound effects.
Every. Single. One.
Players can choose to skip over it if they can’t find a friend to add their likeness or don’t want to think up another set on their own, but it stops the game cold and gets annoying fast. I kinda felt that I was cheating myself out of the “full experience” for not doing them all, but I just found it too time consuming and my wife got annoyed when I tried to take her picture or started making grunting sounds. Fortunately, players won’t encounter too many new characters for each level, but there’s enough to get repetetive after 2 or 3 stages.
Foto Face gets points for using the DSi’s hardware in a kitschy and fun way, but ultimately falls face first (see what I did there?) by being a game that, without the gimmick, would be another title for the bargain bin not worth giving a second look. I suspect its saving grace will be in the form of younger players excited to take a lot of photos and hear their own voice coming from a game, which just might keep em busy in the back seat on those long drives to grandma’s place. And really, isn’t that worth the 8 bucks?
