You are either a boy or girl orphan who dreams of going on an adventure.  One day you meet up with an old man who has an airship.  He is a former explorer, but lost all his Explorer Medals in a violent storm many years ago.  Now it’s your job to explore the land of Poi and help the old man get his medals back.  Poi: Explorer Edition is a 3-D platformer that hearkens back to the days of the N64 and GameCube, where colorful 3-D collect-a-thon platformers were at their peak.

Your hero has all the moves you’d expect a 3-D platformer mascot would have.  You can even triple jump and side flip like Mario.  The airship acta as your hub world, and you point a giant compass to the land you want to go.  Just like Mario 64, each land has medals to get, and when you first start an area, they’ll give you a hint as to how to get that medal.  When you find it, you’ll exit the world. There are other secret medals to find where you must solve a small puzzle or brave an obstacle-filled slide down a mountain.  The more medals you collect, the more worlds you explore and they also unlock music and artwork in the gallery.  Scattered about the levels are coins.  Use them at the airship to buy handy items from the old man.  These include a telescope for seeing things far away, a compass for detecting key items, and a shovel for digging up hidden fossils.

This game definitely gets the feel of a classic 3-D platformer down right.  Aside from the much sharper textures, this game looks like it could’ve been done on the N64, or maybe even late PSOne, early PS2/Dreamcast days. (I also like the adventurous orchestra sounding music)  But it also has many of the same problems.  You’ll have to wrestle with camera angles quite a bit, and I wish the play control wasn’t as stiff.  Hit detection and landing on small platforms also feels a bit off, and when you get hit, you get knocked back quite a bit and fly into the air as well.  Plus I wish you could map the jump button to B instead of A.  But if you miss those 3-D platformers from the early 2000’s era, you might want to check this one out anyway.

Kid Factor:

Poi: Explorer Edition is rated E-10 with an ESRB descriptor of Fantasy Violence.  You can stomp on enemies and kick them away, and when you get hit you fly into the air and say ‘ouch’ while dropping coins.  And when you run out of hearts, you just fall down.  And that’s as violent as it gets.  Reading skill is needed for the text, and younger gamers may need help with the tougher jumping obstacles and sections.

Poi: Explorer Edition was sent to me by Alliance Digital Media for review purposes.

Tags: Game Reviews