Into the Vault: Futurama: The Video Game

Once again, Television is giving us a reason to live! Futurama is officially back yet again, this time on Hulu. I have checked out the new episode and it’s pretty decent, which for the second revival of a show that was originally canceled twenty years ago is pretty remarkable. But today we are here to look back at Futurama’s one shot at video game glory that came out right after it had already been canceled in 2003 for the PlayStation 2 and the original Xbox (there have been a couple of mobile efforts in recent years but those haven’t been particularly noteworthy). Its in-spirit predecessor, The Simpsons, has of course had many video games, most of them very bad, none of them great. With this in and early 2000s licensed games being what they were, you kind of know what you’re in for…

Though honestly, the first level actually does a good job of giving you a false impression that Futurama might actually be ok. The writing and voice acting is pretty sharp and there are a lot of fun easter eggs to find in the Planet Express building so it’s clear at least those aspects were given a lot of care and attention. You can sort of ignore the bad camera angles on the extremely iffy jumping because it’s not extremely detrimental to you getting done what you need to do.

But as soon as you hit that second level, it suddenly becomes far more important, platform jumping is crucial and it’s terrible. But even beyond that, enemies will just cheaply hit you with projectiles from off-screen, you have a gun but it’s very limited in ammo and without it, you go down really quickly on top of which the aiming is atrocious. It’s almost unplayable.

Which is a shame. Were Futurama merely a mediocre game with really great writing, it might’ve actually aged pretty ok and been fondly remembered, but aside from that good writing and voice acting, this is on par with some of the worst video games efforts The Simpsons had produced. It’s not surprising for an early 2000s licensed game, especially one based on a cult show that at the time was already canceled and probably wasn’t given much time or budget but still a disappointment.

I’d love to see some small studio given a chance to make a new Futurama game it could fit a lot of different genres really well. If you are that interested in the cutscenes which are good and sort of serve as a fun “lost episode” they are pretty easy to find online. But if you are looking to get your Futurama fix, you won’t get it here, just keep watching the show…

That’s it for today, I don’t think I’ll squeeze in another blog entry this month but I should be back to regular posting in August so expect another one in the next week or two. See ya real soon!