Vince is a living doll.  A living voodoo doll to be precise.  He wasn't always this way though.  Before some thugs broke into Madam Charmaine's voodoo shop, Vince was content to sit on a shelf until needed as Madam Charmaine's "third best" voodoo doll.  Unfortunately, a failure of an evil mastermind known as Kosmo the Inscrutable has designs on world domination powered by Madam Charmaine's magical voodoo powder.  He sent his henchmen to steal the powder and in spite of themselves they managed to get the powder and kidnap Madam Charmaine.  However, they spilled a good deal of the powder in the process and its magic has begun to warp the world and bring all sorts of nasty things to life.  Fortunately for Madam Charmaine, one of the things brought to life is Vince and so she was able to use her clairvoyant powers to call to Vince and ask him to come to her rescue.  So as the game opens we have Vince reluctantly setting off to rescue his mistress, almost as annoyed at the evildoers for forcing him to get off his shelf as he is for their dastardly kidnapping.

This is going to hurt you a lot more than it's going to hurt me.

Vince is an unusual hero in a masochistic sort of way.  As a voodoo doll he dishes out punishment by hurting himself.  He can unleash voodoo powers that cause him to be cut in half by a bear trap, smashed by an anvil, and even diced by a UFO laser, causing any enemies in the area to suffer a similar fate.  The only difference is that afterwards Vince can stand up and be back on his way.  Vince can also make creative use of his environment to take care of some of the bigger nasties he encounters, say by turning himself into a lightning rod to deliver a 50,000 volt shock to a monster with a bad disposition.  Voodoo attacks take power, and so Vince will have to make use of more conventional attacks a lot of the time.  His basic attacks are of the platform standard punch, spin, and jump and squash variety, but defeating enemies causes them to drop their Mardi Gras beads which refill the voodoo power meter and let you unleash more magical attacks.  While the voodoo attacks are imaginative and fun to unleash, you can't pick which particular attack to use.  This doesn't have an effect on gameplay since they all accomplish the job, but it would have added another layer of gameplay to the game if you had to make sure that you used the best voodoo power for the job.

As in all platform games there is jumping involved in Voodoo Vince, but the game tends to have less of it than the average game in the genre.  When you do jump control is precise and if you miss a jump it will more than likely be your own fault for not timing things right or not lining up the jump correctly.  Vince jumps exactly when you tell him to do so, and key combos for double jumps and other maneuvers are not hard to time properly.  Sounds like a simple thing but many platformers can't get it right and it's good to see that Voodoo Vince did.

Camera control is another big bugaboo of platform games that is not an issue in Voodoo Vince.  As you make your way through the levels the camera moves on its own and your control of it is limited to snapping it back behind Vince in some of the wider areas.  This system works well as the levels are well designed and don't force you to take any blind leaps.  When you really want to get a good look around, you can switch to a "Vince eye view" that switches you to a first person view and lets you pan the camera in all directions.  The first person view is good for getting a good luck at the surrounding area, although on a couple of occasions Vince decided to start running while I was in this supposedly stationary view and launched himself down precipices.

So you run around putting bad mojo on monsters and doing a little jumping, what else is there?  Well first of all you've got items that you must collect in each level.  Zombie dust bags can be found lying around the levels and if you collect 100 of them Vince gets a larger health meter.  There are also hearts which bestow extra lives and pages from a spell book.  If you collect every one of the latter item from a level, a power skull will appear and lead you on a chase through the level.  If you keep up with it until the end of its flight you'll be rewarded with a larger voodoo meter that will let you queue up more than one voodoo power before you have to recharge it from the beginning.

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