Scooby Doo 2 - Dark Dungeons Review

Costas Stephanides’s Review

A fun game for all you pesky kids and super sleuths

Scooby Doo 2 ingeniously follows on from Scooby Doo 1 ?? Castle Capers.

In this edition, you have to solve countless puzzles through 14 dungeon levels. What is great about the Scooby games is that you have to control both Shaggy and Scooby to solve all the puzzles.

The graphics are good. The characters are faithfully drawn right down to Fred??s scarf. They have managed to fit a lot in a screen and as such the sprite sizes are a little small but bearable. As with a lot of Macrospace games, you can turn some of the display features off to make the game play a bit faster on some of the older handsets. This was not a problem for the 6600.

Along with the good graphics you also have a choice of music and sound effects. In the options you will also notice a dialogue option. Unfortunately, the characters do not actually speak, instead speech bubbles appear. This still works well and fans of the series will find themselves impersonating the voices and the Scooby laugh!

It??s the usual stuff to move your character around the screen. Pressing 1 will switch between the troublesome twosome and the d-pad moves them around.

In this sequel there are plenty of things to do. There are floating rafts to control, keys to collect and mummies to avoid. One quick hint, you can hide inside barrels to move around undetected by the mummies. Although if you do hit anything you will lose a life. See our hints for some more tips.

There are 14 levels but it did feel a lot longer. The final level was slightly easy though but at least it ended with the immortal lines about those pesky kids. With regards to longevity, the game will take you a while to complete but you will enjoy the experience. There is always the ubiquitous high score to beat if you cant get enough of the dog.

Your score is calculated based on the time to complete each level. You can continue a few times although naturally your score does go back to zero.

They have captured the essence of the cartoon wonderfully and is a must for any fans. It even comes complete with Scooby snacks. Definitely better than the recent movies (and cheaper).