2/5 ★ – stephenhill777's review of Buzz Lightyear of Star Command.

Buzz Lightyear of Star Command is one of those games that sat at the bottom of many a bargain bin during my teenage years. The strange thing was, I never heard anything about whether it was good or not, which always prompted curiosity. Now, almost 20 years later, that curiosity has been sated. It turns out, it’s not particularly good. The game has a bizarre format. It’s not the straightforward platformer/third-person shooter you might be imagining. Every level is built upon the central conceit of chasing villains to the finish line, and then arresting them via the medium of laser blasts. And by chasing, I mean that in the very literal sense. If the villains get to the end of the level before you do, a timer starts. This indicates how long you have before they “get away” and you need to restart the level again. If you manage to finish before them, a decent percentage of their health is chipped away by one of your sidekicks, making the boss fight considerably easier. It’s a neat premise, but hardly one worth basing an entire game around. Making every single level in your game time-based is a bad idea, for obvious reasons. There is no down time, no moment in which you can take in your surroundings or collect items at a leisurely pace. This might be the point, considering how flat the levels are and how poorly hidden the collectibles are. The vast majority are usually sitting directly in your path, so as not to interfere with the central goal of getting to the finish line as fast as possible. There is a little bit of fun to be had in multi-tasking, blasting enemies and collecting as many medals as possible without sacrificing momentum. But it’s a basic, rote experience, and falters quickly. It doesn’t help that the game is artificially padded. Levels are locked behind how many medals you have, similar to the stars in Mario 64. This means you will need to replay levels multiple times in order to progress. Unfortunately, the level progression is linear, both in how they are unlocked and how they play. Each mission has two alternative objectives to the main mission in which to win medals: A time trial (which is identical to the main mission, sans the boss fight) and a scavenger hunt (which is also timed). They aren’t bad, and these modes never really road-blocked me, but they add nothing. A saving grace is how easy the game is overall. While there is a lot of repetition, and very little in the way of excitement, you will at least breeze through it at a rapid pace. It’s also worth mentioning that clips from the TV show are scattered haphazardly throughout the game, and give the experience a feverish Greatest Hits vibe. They don’t always have a clear connection with the levels you have just played, which serves to underline just how low-budget this effort clearly was. Inoffensive and mostly unworthy of your time, despite how little effort is required to complete it.