Ben 10: Power Trip

My first reaction booting up Ben 10: Power Trip was that someone had taken a solid concept, open-world superhero platformer, swap between alien forms on the fly, and shipped it about six months before it was ready. The visuals hit somewhere around late PS2 era, the camera picks fights with you during combat, and the opening hours are a procession of fetch quests that would embarrass a lesser RPG. Find one person's cat. Then find another person's cat, two quests later. That's the tone of the early game in a sentence. Stick with it past that rough start, though, and the alien-swapping system is the one thing Power Trip does genuinely well. You unlock a small roster across the campaign, Shockrock for electric grapple attacks, XLR8 for speed traversal and grinding power lines (a clear Jet Set Radio nod, according to the developers), Diamondhead for shields and gap-crossing, Four Arms for throwing heavy objects, HeatBlast for a double-jump, Rath for tracking scent trails to buried collectibles. No two aliens feel redundant, and the game quietly uses them as gating tools in both exploration and combat. When the level design actually pushes you to swap forms regularly, it clicks into something that resembles a good budget platformer. The open world is set across European locations and is small but reasonably packed, void crystals to smash for Omnitrix power-ups you invest across Power, Toughness, and Luck upgrade paths, side quests, scooter challenges, a wave-based combat arena, and collectibles including golden monkey heads and bratwursts, which is a sentence I did not expect to write. The campaign itself is short; the surrounding content pads things out, though collectible hunts can turn maddening when you're chasing the final item with zero map guidance. Failing does almost nothing, you respawn in place with minimal penalty, so the challenge floor is basically nonexistent, which tracks for the target audience. Local split-screen co-op lets a second player jump in as Kevin Levin, which is the best way to play this with a younger sibling or child. Critics noted co-op has some technical roughness, so don't expect a seamless experience there. There's no online play, which is a missed opportunity. The story is a throwaway villain-of-the-week plot, and anyone hoping for the show's stronger writing will find the narrative thin. What carries the game is the alien variety, not the script. For adults or teens without a Ben 10 attachment, the mixed Steam reception makes sense: the game is adequately functional but visually dated, mechanically shallow outside the transform system, and over before it builds much momentum. For a kid who knows every alien by name, this is probably the best Ben 10 video game available, which is faint praise, but it's earned.

Alex · Scout Team

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