Joe Danger 2: The Movie

I've spent time with a lot of couch racers over the years, and very few of them open with a sequence where you're escaping a boulder in a minecart, swap to a jetpack mid-level, and somehow collect letters that spell D-A-N-G-E-R while dodging laser-firing robots. Joe Danger 2: The Movie earns your attention immediately, and it mostly keeps it. At its core this is a side-scrolling stunt game that sits somewhere between Trials and classic Sonic. You ride, ski, jetpack, and minecart your way through 100 levels across six acts, each themed around a Hollywood movie parody, from time-travel action blockbusters to spy capers. Controls are deliberately approachable: tricks are mapped to shoulder buttons or a thumbstick flick, boost charges up by pulling off stunts, and if you wipe out the game snaps you back to the nearest checkpoint without penalty theatre. Casual players will crack the basics inside ten minutes. The depth creeps in through secondary objectives in each stage, things like collecting every star, spelling out D-A-N-G-E-R, stopping a nuclear launch, or not triggering a single alarm, which push the more obsessive players into replaying levels over and over chasing perfect runs. It's a very tolerant difficulty curve until it isn't, and that's a good thing. The local multiplayer is the obvious party-night pitch, and it mostly delivers. Up to four players compete on split-screen in a scoring race that mixes trick points, item collection, and outright sabotage of each other, which one reviewer described as sitting somewhere between a racing game and Super Smash Bros. Answering the "is it fun for four drunk friends" question honestly: yes, for a session or two. The problem is that the dedicated multiplayer track count is thin. Community members noted only around 11 competitive tracks out of the box, and because the level editor doesn't feed into multiplayer maps, Workshop content doesn't fix the shortage. There is no online multiplayer at all; this is strictly a same-couch activity. Worth flagging clearly if you're buying primarily for remote sessions with friends. The PC version also supports Remote Play Together via Steam, which partially bridges the gap, but it wasn't the intended experience. Older reports mention occasional controller detection issues with third and fourth Xbox pads in local play, so have a backup connection method handy. For solo players the picture is rosier. The PC port includes Steam Workshop integration through the renamed Movie Maker level editor, which is powerful and intuitive enough that creative types can lose hours in it. You also get ghost racing on leaderboards, a Deleted Scenes bonus mode with extra-challenging objectives, an Ultra Hard tier for masochists, and PC-exclusive character skins including all nine Team Fortress 2 classes and a Minecraft level theme. The campaign alone is the stronger package compared to the first Joe Danger, offering more vehicle variety, more visual theme changes, and more outlandish objectives. A handful of critics felt the sequel's maximalist style occasionally crossed into sensory overload, and the unicycle vehicle specifically got called out as poorly designed. Load times on older hardware were flagged as 20 to 30 seconds between levels, which breaks up the otherwise snappy rhythm. Mac users should note the game is not compatible with macOS 10.15 Catalina or above. For the price of a cheap lunch you're getting a polished, funny stunt platformer with a campaign that rewards replay, a Workshop with user levels to extend the life, and a couch multiplayer mode that will deliver a solid Saturday night hour before the limited track pool starts to show. Just don't come in expecting an online competitive experience or a deep split-screen tournament mode. Hello Games were a tiny studio at the time, and the craft here shows in every level layout; No Man's Sky got all the headlines later, but this is the game that proved they had serious design instincts.

Riley · Scout Team

Sports & racing

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