Mojo for PlayStation 2 Reviews by Gamers

Ahhhh, Mojo. Imagine Super Monkey Ball without the charming monkeys...the innovative level design...the tight controls...or any of the fun.

You might get a little something like Crave's Mojo for the PS2. Oh, but Boomshadow, you say. Aren't you being a bit tough on a 2003 release you're only now reviewing in 2007?

Not really. I played a game like this on a DOS PC in 1996 called "dschump" (Apparently a German attempt to phoneticize "Jump" without using the letter "J"). It was free, and lasted about 40 levels, and was fun for what it was: A game where the object was to get a ball from one place to another while taking out targets in between. Sure, the graphics were only 320 x 240 (the game was originally written in 1994), but it was fun...for free.

Mojo adds hundreds of little blocks to knock out, with the added proviso that the player's ball can only take out blocks the same color as the ball. Colors can change with the use of inductors. The courses are fully three-dimensional, with quite a lot of slopes, hills, valleys, and places to drop off. Unfortunately, sloppy, slow controls; a manual camera that still seems to drift a bit; and overly powerful attractors and repulsors get in the way instead of contributing to the challenge of gameplay.

The game boasts 100 levels, but after about the 30th or 40th, they all start to feel very similar. Mojo is set in several worlds, each of which contains several levels...which, within each world, have just one repetitive ambient song. It's fine for awhile...then it just makes a typical player want to claw his or her ears off.
Because there are no characters in the game, there is no real story--just time targets to meet, after which you begin to lose "mojo" (which has nothing to do with Austin Powers, though I would even have welcomed characters from that franchise to break up the monotony after awhile). Lose enough, and your game is over.

And you'll be glad. Don't make my mistake. Don't add this to your "Q".