Jackie Chan Stuntmaster Review

This was a game I never even heard of for the longest time, I just randomly heard of it because it was one of Radical Entertainment's first games and it was a 3D melee brawler on the PS1 or at least that's what I thought of going in. In reality, Stuntmaster isn't really a 3D beat em up, it's more a 3D platformer in the vein of Crash Bandicot with beat em up sections.

The story and presentation is pretty charming, there isn't much of one and there isn't many cutscenes but what cutscenes there are pretty charming with how exaggerated everything looks and how it seems like they to combine real life with a cartoony art style. I kind of wished there was more of a story and cutscene here since I like how goofy the presentation the game has in the occasional cutscenes that popped up.

The melee combat is kind of okay, I wouldn't really call it outright bad since much of the game I was able to play without using cheats. First things I noticed right away was the geniune lack of invicibility frames and how there are no crowd control attacks, so if you try to take on 3 enemies attacking you at once, it might as well be a game over. However, Stuntmaster much to my surprise has a dedicated dodge button, and while you can't cancel out of a combo, I did spend much of my time, doing the various punching and kicking combos and then dodging after completing them, it was often a game of taking enemies out one at a time rather than fighting groups head on. Weapons also came in handy but they can be a little imprecise to hit enemies with since the combos for them can be a 50-50 guessing game of me landing a hit or Jackie getting hit and then dropping the weapon.

The bosses are surprisingly some of the better on the PS1, they aren't the most amazing, but they have far more going on than survival horror, Tomb Raider or various shooter bosses on the same system, since each one has their own gimmick and you have to wait for the right time to hit and them while you dodge their attacks. It's kind of on par with Crash, Spyro and MGS1 bosses. There's only a few of them though.

However combat doesn't really change all that much, you don't get any new abilties, combos and combat remains the same for pretty much all of the game, I was starting to bored of it so I pretty much used an infinite health cheat towards the end of the game. There is stuff like environmental hazards and how you and even your enemies can fall off various stages but it serves to be more annoying than fun, it can be amusing to see enemies fall to their death but it happening to you just makes it more frustrating than anything, and the game has lengthy load times on top of a lives system so I just abused the save states on emulator.

This is where I get into my next major negative, the platforming is very much like Crash Bandicot, the problem with this is that everything Stuntmaster does with it's platforming, Crash does better. For one you get to see Crash's shadow when platforming and there isn't anything like this in the latter on top of this, if I want to play Crash Bandicot, I'd go play Crash. There is one impressive subway setpiece and it's pretty cool the first time but it gets reused so much that the whole thing gets tiresome and turns into diminishing returns due to how often it pops up in the sewer level.

If you like the 3D beat em up sections, the platforming is just going to annoy you, if you like the platforming, the beat em up sections will annoy you, I wonder who this game is even for at times because of this.

The final big issue is that levels just go on for too long. Usually in a platformer, levels tend to go by very quickly depending on how good you are but combined this with the beat em up sections and this pretty much make the levels feel longer even though all of them are less than 15 minutes since beat em up gameplay in most if not every game tend to be lengthy and like I said before neither platforming or beat em up gameplay is enchanced by each other.

Overall, I wanted Jackie Chan Stuntmaster to be a hidden game and even possibly being a 3D beat em up that predates the first Devil May Cry and Onimusha games that is actually pretty good and it wasn't. I wouldn't call the game terrible but it all in all it just feels incredibly confused in terms of game design.