1.5/5 ★ – Endless_backlog's review of The Mummy Returns.

I wasn’t expecting much going into this and bar a few cool features there really is much more bad than good in all honesty. As a fan of The Mummy I enjoyed the premise and playing as Imhotep was a novelty. What I enjoyed about this was that he has the ability to drain stunned enemies of their life to replenish his health bar. I particularly liked the detail that as your health bar depletes you physically see him become more of a corpse the closer you are to dying. He also has a few fun useful spells that can be collected such as resurrection and death. I’m glad I chose him as watching clips of the voice acting for Rick O’Conell (not Brendan Frasers voice) and his son were cringey and laughable. Unfortunately the game is very linear with not a lot of variety in each level. They also missed the opportunity for better levels by cutting them from the game and instead just covering them with a narrated paragraph?! One thing that needs mentioning is the platforming.. having to walk close to an edge to change your block button into a jump button is insane. The jungle level in particular was brutal. There’s a moment where you have to jump on stones to cross a swamp, but there is literally no indication of where the solid ground ends and the swamp starts, so you try and get close enough that your jump will make the stone and end up walking into the swamp, and since this game has no checkpoints you have to start the level all over again every time. The map was horrible to follow and even worse was the cursor that had a mind of its own. I’d constantly get lost in levels in particular the tomb and Cairo. The enemies were fairly easy to wipe out throughout the game except for the final boss where the difficulty spikes dramatically. If it wasn’t for the brand you’d struggle to get people to play this and for fans of the movie the novelty is stretched pretty thin by lack of creativity and poor game design. The story is strong enough that I believe they could make a modern version that would do well, but for me this is just another movie to game pumped out because they had the license to.