DaGeDar: It’s A Game!

[gameinfo title=”Game Info” game_name=”DaGeDar” developers=”GameMill” publishers=”GameMill Publishing” platforms=”DS” genres=”Fantasy Racing” release_date=”11/8/11″]

DaGeDar is budget title and it makes no claims otherwise. The box bullet points are all exactly what is in this game. 33 levels, yes. 100 DaGeDars, yes. Multiplayer, yes. There is no story and the four game modes are instantly apparent when you load the game. This game is exactly what it says it is and nothing more. Now keeping that in mind DaGeDar is actually a competent and mostly fun game.

There really is not a whole lot to the gameplay at all. You are a ball on a 2D plane, you must go faster than the other ball. There are four modes to the game and all of them revolve around being faster than something, except for the practice mode. While racing the other ball there is no interaction giving the feeling that you are racing against a pre recorded ghost rather than an the computer. This feeling is bolstered because while the AI may make a mistake the first lap, and the same mistakes sometimes, they will make no mistakes every lap after that. You are forced to play in sort of a “Perfect run” mindset that can be very frustrating. However when you are winning and doing that perfect run it is super fun.

The levels themselves are green lines with a few boosters and hazards sprinkled throughout. There are 33 levels and about 80% of them feel inspired while the others are a real pain to play. Every level is some variation of the green track but they do mix up the backgrounds and add things like rain which are purely for ascetics. The backgrounds are all very bland however and just look really dull and make the rest of the game feel dull as well. Some sort of interaction with anything, your opponent, the background, or even another command besides jump or boost would have really livened this game up. As is you really have to be stomping the opponent, or clock, to get any sort of satisfaction from DaGeDar.

Besides being bland I have one major gripe against this game and that is the difficulty. I may sound like a wuss for saying this but DaGeDar is way to hard. For a game that is aimed at kids it is extremely unforgiving. Sure you can go into the practice mode and learn the levels but even then you need to preform perfect runs just to beat the computer by fractions of a second. There is no ramp up to this either as the first level is thrown at you more like a learning wall than a learning curve. The DaGeDars you unlock will have differing levels of speed, acceleration, and control none of which really make a difference because your opponent will always be faster and more adept than you. Any kind of powerup would have been nice if just to make it more about skill than memorization.

The one thing you do collect in this game is more DaGeDars and that is surprisingly fun. After beating the novice races I went back to the time trials with my better ball started knocking those out, receiving a new ball after every race. You pretty much get a DaGeDar for doing anything right in this game. The collector mentality really comes into play and I could see this really hooking some people in. The only real downside is that you never seems to get any new balls that are much better than the ones you already have which is frustrating when you get to the harder tracks. It is a neat side diversion but nothing really that interesting.