Quackshot Starring Donald Duck (Genesis) review "There was a time when any new Disney platformer was a safe bet; you could lay down your cash money and be pretty sure the game you were buying was at least gonna be decent, if not awesome. Disney had a particularly sweet run of games on the Genesis with Castle of Illusion, Fantasia, Legend of Illusion, and finally Quackshot (Donald's only starring role of the era and the best of the bunch in my opinion). That time has obviously passed since Disney games fucking suck now, but Quackshot is a tes..."

There was a time when any new Disney platformer was a safe bet; you could lay down your cash money and be pretty sure the game you were buying was at least gonna be decent, if not awesome. Disney had a particularly sweet run of games on the Genesis with Castle of Illusion, Fantasia, Legend of Illusion, and finally Quackshot (Donald's only starring role of the era and the best of the bunch in my opinion). That time has obviously passed since Disney games fucking suck now, but Quackshot is a testament to what the company used to be capable of.

Quackshot spans 8 unique levels of awesomeness, and other than re-using some of the same enemies on every level, it never throws the same type of challenges at you enough to bore you. Each level has a different goal to achieve; whether it's fighting a boss, finding an item you need, or upgrading your plunger. Usually games follow the stage-boss-stage-boss formula to a fault, but here that is for the most part thrown out the window as some levels don't even have a boss, and some have a couple.

Initially you are given your choice of 3 different levels to tackle, each one with a checkpoint about halfway through where you can call Huey, Duey, and Luey in a plane to transport you out of the level and back to the map screen. You'll be VERY thankful for this the first time somebody tells you "You need X item to go any further!" and X item is in another stage. Instead of making you slog all the way back through the stage after finding the item, you can simply start from the checkpoint. It's a small thing, but it's genius and nearly gets rid of any backtracking (which generally pisses everyone off) and makes the game fun instead of a chore.

The most unique aspect of the game though is Donald's main weapon, the plunger. You can't actually kill enemies unless you use some of your limited supply of Bubbles or Corn, your plunger will merely stun them for a while and give you enough time to escape. The plunger also serves as a stepping stone as you can stick it to walls and jump off it. Hell you can even get an "ancient viking plunger" and stick yourself to birds if you need to cross a chasm.

What really sets this bad boy up as a kickass game is the way everything comes together. I'm a man who can barely stand to play platformers for more than 2 minutes anymore, but Quackshot's mixture of smooth difficulty, some limited "quest" items, and themed levels had me nearly thinking I was playing an adventure platformer.

I can't recommend this game highly enough, not only as a great platformer, but as a relic from an age before everything had to have attitude and Xtreme shit painfully injected into it.

Community review by guts (June 14, 2005) A bio for this contributor is currently unavailable, but check back soon to see if that changes. If you are the author of this review, you can update your bio from the Settings page.