Gaming: Upcoming Scott Pilgrim Ex Review

Scott Pilgrim EX is a palatable fresh helping of retro beatdown goodness, but it's too brief and easygoing to deliver more fun than its inspirations or its best contemporaries.

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I like garlic bread. It’s not really a meal, though. Most comfort foods are hearty and filling, but few taste as good as even cheap garlic bread, which leaves me full in a comparatively hollow sort of way. Maybe I love it because beneath all the carbohydrates, garlic bread is nostalgic—and nostalgia is also craveable and easy to love but, in great quantities, bad for you.

What is it? A side scrolling beat ‘em up inspired by a legendary comic book, from the developers of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Shredder’s Revenge.

Reviewed on: Windows 11, NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3060 Ti, Intel Core i7-12700F, 16GB RAM

Side-scrolling beat ‘em ups tend to have the same reputation, perhaps unfairly, and I think that’s why recent ones like the excellent Absolum and Scott Pilgrim EX exhibit an urge to fuse with more apparently nutritious, thinky genres like roguelikes and RPGs. In EX’s case, the result is a modern take on River City Ransom set in an explorable city stuffed with secrets and chatty NPCs, where money pours out of enemies and each of the seven playable characters embodies a fighting game archetype, waiting to be upgraded with stat-boosting items. It’s bigger than developer Tribute’s previous games, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Shredder's Revenge and Marvel: Cosmic Invasion, and sometimes better. But it feels mostly like a lateral move that I wish had either committed harder to its unique ideas or stuck to the simplicity of its inspirations.

I still liked it though, because I like garlic bread.

Scott Pilgrim EX's campaign is a hefty five-ish hours—that's short in many genres, but quite long compared to beat 'em ups in coin-op cabinets designed to pilfer $5 from you in 45 minutes. Each character is powered up by four stats you can buy at shops: strength boosts attack power and throwables, vitality increases health, willpower beefs up collectible assist supers, and agility improves your movement speed and crit chance.

When I first saw this stuff, I got a little worried. The first Scott Pilgrim game has a notoriously slow start because a good chunk of your power came from progression, and w

Source: PC Gamer