Futurama the show has been under-appreciated during its abbreviated run on television. However, Futurama the game doesn’t run that risk because it has very little to appreciate in the first place. You can add it to the list of licensed games that a true fan may view as a labor of love but will be a chore for everyone else.

Before getting into the game’s shortcomings, I’d first like to point out the game’s highlight: its great cutscenes. The game’s storyline was penned by the show’s writers and they put the same effort into it that they do on a TV episode. All of the show’s voice talent was assembled for the game, so the voice work is show quality as well. Futurama fans will probably view the cutscenes as a “lost episode” of the series, even though the 3D models used for their favorite characters in these scenes look a little, well, strange. Somehow Fry lost his chin in the move to video games, among other little oddities. The downside to the TV episode within a game is that you have to play the game to view all of the scenes, and that’s where Futurama stops being fun.

Fry enters the sewers.

In the game you will have the opportunity to control in turn Fry, Leela, Bender, and, briefly, Zoidberg. The problem is that these Futurama favorites have been plopped down into a generic platformer that shows that the designers were simply going through the motions. It’s pretty sad, actually, because so much effort went into the game’s storyline and cutscenes.

Each character has the ability to jump and has an attack move – pretty generic platformer stuff here. Fry can play with guns, Leela has her kung fu moves, and Bender uses his metallic appendages to put the hurt on. No matter which character you are playing – you have no choice or character swapping here, you need to play through a character’s levels before getting to play as a new one – you are faced with tedious jumping sequences and repetitive fighting. Most of the puzzles are simple switch-flipping affairs, although surprisingly there are a few that are inexplicably more original such as one based on a musical pattern.

The generic platform action would be tolerable on its own, but Futurama suffers from numerous problems. The game uses a target lock feature for your attacks in which you have to lock on an enemy to fight him. Unfortunately the target lock also locks onto breakable objects so when there are several objects in a room you’ll often find yourself destroying all of the crates while you take damage from your untouched attackers. The next issue is that the collision detection for the jump puzzles is too unforgiving. There are a lot of jumping puzzles in this game and more often than not a missed jump means instant death. It is incredibly frustrating to make the first ten jumps of a jump sequence, land the eleventh just the same way in which you did the previous ten, and then find yourself falling off the edge of the platform. The frustration caused by these problems pales in comparison to that unleashed by the game’s save system. The game divides each episode into a few checkpoints – few and far between checkpoints. If you die you’re faced with a return to the last checkpoint which can put you back a ways. Even worse, the level will be reset which means that you’ll have to fight each enemy all over again and redo the puzzles. Tedium to the extreme, but that’s not the worst part. The game is only saved at the beginning of the level. Lose all of your lives and you are going all the way back and redoing everything all over again. Some levels can take you 15 or 20 minutes to complete and if you miss a jump in the 19th minute and are out of lives your punishment is to lose all of that time to a complete level restart. Unless you really love Futurama and must see the game’s cutscenes, that is about the point where you’ll quit on the game and never pick it up again.

In The End, This Game Hath Been Rated: 64%.  A labor of love for Futurama fans with extreme levels of patience, torturous tedium for everybody else.