Fluid Feathers and Retro Vibes
Go! Go! Mister Chickums is a single screen platformer inspired by arcade games from the 80s.
Now visually, the game does a great job catching the retro vibe, and there are a few more detailed animations sprinkled throughout that give Mister Chickums some very fluid animation that looks genuinely fantastic. The title screen is a great example of this, and some transitionary animations throughout the game use the same style, and they are, again, fantastic. It’s just a shame there aren’t more of them in the game itself.
Music is a bit more of a mixed bag, as there are some catchy songs throughout, but others will seem more redundant and less impressive. In general though, the music is never overbearing and it again captures that more retro vibe that the game is inspired by.
Egg-Scrambling Mechanics
Go! Go! Mister Chickums is centered around the core gameplay mechanic of needing to collect several eggs scattered around a single room stage and throw them into a nest. Eggs can be angled up and down slightly when thrown, allowing them to be bounced off walls and enemies to get into the nest faster. Or if right next to the nest, it’s possible to just throw them downward and have them pop right in.
As mentioned, enemies populate each stage. Some will fly, others will crawl, and there are even those that will hurl projectiles at Mister Chickums as he goes about his egg gathering business. Getting hit by any of these enemies will cost Mister Chickums a life. He has three lives to start and if you get enough points it’s possible to increase the life count. Some levels even feature an extra life pickup.
Arcade Spirit with a Modern Safety Net
However, if Mister Chickums loses all his lives, it’s game over and you have to choose whether to stop playing or continue. Don’t fret though because this is where Go! Go! Mister Chickums deviates from classic 80s arcade games. Instead of restarting or needing to insert your allowance into a machine to keep playing, the game simply allows you to pick back up at the start of the level you are at. No restarting at the beginning of a long stage, or right at the front of the game. The one caveat is that your score is reset back to zero. The only way to get a huge score is to play continuously without dying.
The High Score Grind
Points are, of course, gained by gathering the eggs, but when starting a level you may notice one egg flashing compared to the others. Grabbing this egg gives double the points and collecting eggs in sequence will maximize your score. There are also fried eggs, as well as gold and fruit pickups to get more points.
Unless you’re someone with a major desire to see that number climb into the millions though, there isn’t much point in engaging with the score system. While points do grant bonus lives, the levels are easy enough to complete with the baseline three that Mister Chickums gets. Dying may reset the score to zero, but there isn’t a way to look at leaderboards or even check your personal best score. Making the entire mechanic a bit pointless.
The gameplay itself is also fine but becomes redundant fast, and it’s not without some minor bugs.
To start, when holding an egg, Mister Chickums moves slower and can’t jump nearly as high. In most cases, the throw mechanic makes this manageable, but several levels are laid out so that you have to climb to the upper portion of the stage to collect eggs, while the nest they need to be delivered to is at the bottom of the level. Eggs will bounce off a platform if thrown at it, so this means you need to drop below the platform before the egg can be thrown to the nest. That ultimately means many levels require repeating the same actions over and over again to complete them.
The other option would be to grab multiple eggs, throw them towards the nest and once they are all there, go and pick them up to collect them. However, eggs disappear within seconds of being thrown, so even trying to move two eggs across the level is difficult. Oftentimes it’s best just to collect a single egg at a time instead of trying to outrun the timer since juggling two eggs is hectic.
On top of that, enemies also respawn incredibly fast, so if there are several blocking your path, trying to move multiple eggs becomes nearly impossible. Especially since hitting one with an egg can cause it to fly off course and lead to it respawning.
Because of these gameplay quirks there are several levels that would be incredibly short if not for the fact that there can be five eggs in a secluded spot on the map that need to be individually moved to the nest. These sequences aren’t hard, just repetitive, which makes the game drag on.
Level Design Quirks
Another level design quirk, which thankfully wasn’t super prevalent, was the fact that some levels require having Mister Chickums bounce on enemies’ heads to reach higher platforms. In this case those fast foe respawns are helpful, but it’s actually slower than you can collect the eggs, which leads to waiting for them to spawn which again slows down the game.
Whenever a level is cleared, all the enemies on it will explode into fruit which Mister Chickums can pick up for bonus points. This means those same levels where enemies need to be used as springboards actually give less points, because once the enemies explode there’s no way to access half the level anymore. Which again leads to waiting and watching, while the fruit taunts you from out of reach.
On top of this, there are stages that introduce ice, water, and wind mechanics, which make movement more cumbersome and further slow things down. Again, that highlights the issues with Go! Go! Mister Chickums’ approach to increasing difficulty. Instead of clever problem-solving through having unique ways to throw eggs or bounce them off enemies, the game just makes it harder to move. Which makes things tougher but not more satisfying to play.
Granted, there are a wide variety of stage designs and enemies to encounter, so variety is at least never an issue. But they never capitalize on the decent foundation they’ve built. That’s not to say there aren’t any levels that start to use the mechanics in more fun ways, but the problem is in the proportion. Out of the 100 levels in the game, only a handful start to play with mechanics in interesting ways.
Beyond this there are some minor bugs that popped up during my playthrough. Hitting some of the moving platforms caused Mister Chickums to stutter in place, and on occasion enemies would teleport across the screen or their sprite would start freaking out. There were also a couple of times when enemies would shift out of their normal position and this caused them to either block ways to move around the map, or in one case for it to stop doing anything at all. These were minor things, but they just added another layer of mild frustration onto an already tedious experience.
Speed-Running the Villainous Grabbo
Every 10 levels culminates in a boss fight, but these are the easiest levels of the game. Grabbo is the name of the villain and he appears in each of these boss fight levels. Hitting him three times ends the fight and there are a couple of eggs scattered around the level to do just that. But each fight begins with him taunting Mister Chickums and in that time it is possible to grab the eggs and hit him three times before he has a chance to do anything else.
It’s no exaggeration to say I managed to finish most of these fights in under 10 seconds; several of them in less than half that time.
A Vibrant but Repetitive Nesting Journey
The issue with Go! Go! Mister Chickums is that it is a game that doesn’t seem to be built for its target audience. If it was inspired by games from the 80s, it would be expected to target an older gaming crowd. The art, which is one of the strongest selling points, is aimed towards a younger audience though. The game is also not very difficult. It’s tedious at times, but rarely tricky, incredibly forgiving by not making players restart large sections of the game like old school arcade games would.
80s gamers that have kids now may find the appeal in some of that, and maybe that was the goal because there is a local co-op mode.
Unfortunately, while there seems to be a good base and some heart at the core of Go! Go! Mister Chickums, the repetitive gameplay which is fueled by tedious level design and movement hampering game mechanics, prevent it from being very fun for any prolonged amount of time.
Important Links
Go! Go! Mister Chickums – Old-School Arcade Chaos On Modern Consoles – https://www.thexboxhub.com/go-go-mister-chickums-old-school-arcade-chaos-on-modern-consoles/
Buy from the Xbox Store – https://www.xbox.com/en-gb/games/store/Go-Go-Mister-Chickums/9PBBRQ2L6X32
