Scott Pilgrim EX Review

Scott Pilgrim EX is set in Toronto, Canada in the year 20XX where the city has been taken over by three gangs: Vegans, Robots and Demons. And to make things worse, Scott’s bandmates have been abducted by evil forces. It’s up to our protagonist to save his friends in order to rid the city of the three evil groups.

Scott Pilgrim EX is a 2D side scrolling beat’em up where players will explore a vast city map in order to complete a bevy of quests to save his bandmates and find instruments and riffs in order to progress through the story. Instead of traditional level design, the game is built akin to River City Ransom where you’ll run around a semi-open city back and forthing to complete the game.

While his bandmates were kidnapped, Scott still has some friends left as he’s one of seven selectable characters which also includes Ramona Flowers, a random robot or Lucas Lee. Our heroes can use normal and strong attacks, a special attack that consumes GP, and quite useful when you’re surrounded. You can grab enemies, to punch and/or throw. If things get too rough, you can also block. If you use a direction alongside the strong attack (Y button), you’ll perform a different attack for each direction.

Another interesting feature, as you complete quests and liberate your bandmates, you’ll unlock additional characters you can call for temporary backup. Stephen Stills can give you (very) brief invincibility, Demon Hispter Chick can fly around and shoot fireballs and Knives Chau can boost your speed for a short time. This is just a sample of diverse friends you can call upon. You can also equip two badges for extra perks such as calling in assists costing less GP or some attacks being automatically blocked.

As you fight your way through the city and come across more aggressive opposition, you’ll be able to visit shops to purchase equipment to increase your attributes (such as floral dress, texas boots, etc…) or buy food items to replenish your health and GP meter or even increase your agility. Bosses will drop item that will permanently increase your stats; sometimes random cronies as well will drop these items. There’s even an equipable item that will increase the drops.

The game looks great in all of its 16-bits glory. Same color palette, similar assets and character design as Ubisoft Scott Pilgrim vs The World from a few years ago. While the map is a single city, each area has its own theme, some to match one of the three gangs. Some portals lead you to outerspace, which is a nice, albeit brief change of pace. Enemy diversity is fine and predictable. Bosses are overall fun and pretty challenging. The soundtrack is a fun, upbeat mix of electronic music and rock score, once again composed by Anamanaguchi.

One the problems here is the game’s overall pacing/balancing. Some quests have lengthy fetch-questing while some quests require you to go from point A to point B and BAMM already another boss battle. Additionally, the leveling up system isn’t that “fun”. Instead of consistently improving by gaining XP for example, bosses will drop items that will improve strength, ability, health; etc.. But it’s clearly not enough to keep up with slowly increasing difficulty.

Normal enemies will sometime randomly drop upgrades… meaning if you’re lucky, you could pick up a few upgrades in a row. While other times, you could go through a handful of quests without any drops. The other nuisance is that there’s a single save slot. So you can’t start a solo playthrough and have a different slot where you can play with your friends. Early on, and throughout most of the game, some characters feels sluggish and slow to use; it’s annoying especially as early bosses move incredibly fast leaving frustrated.

Scott Pilgrim EX is an enjoyable game. It follows the beat’em up template to a tee and doesn’t take any risks. Despite its questionable pacing and random attribute upgrades, the game is a fun and challenging with a surprisingly addictive combat system. Boss battles provide a fair challenge and this genre is always a good time with a friend. If you enjoy the genre, Scott Pilgrim EX is a decent entry but feels like it could’ve been more.