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Tim Burton’s The Nightmare Before Christmas: Oogie’s Revenge Review: Is It Worth Buying?

The Nightmare Before Christmas

Tim Burton’s The Nightmare Before Christmas: Oogie’s Revenge Review: Is It Worth Buying?

Tim Burton’s The Nightmare Before Christmas: Oogie’s Revenge is an action-adventure game. This game was developed by Tose for PlayStation 2 and Xbox in 2004. Based on Burton’s animated feature, The Nightmare Before Christmas: Oogie’s Revenge finds our hero, Jack Skellington, enjoying life in his hometown. 

When he decides to take a short trip to test out a new weapon called the Soul Robber he returns to find that his gal Sally has been kidnapped. And the town booby trapped by his old nemesis, Oogie, who has returned to haunt him and spread his evil after being stitched together by Lock, Shock and Barrel.

Jack’s Exciting Abilities to Transform Characters

The Nightmare Before Christmas
Jack gaining points for bone chilling combo.

Jack is able to transform himself into various characters. Such as, Santa Jack and Pumpkin King Jack each with different abilities that can be used to get past certain obstacles and bosses. Santa Jack can drop presents that act like bombs with various effects that stun enemies or freeze them. Pumpkin King Jack is able to shoot fire out his mouth.

Tim Burton’s The Nightmare Before Christmas Oogie’s Revenge Gameplay

Nightmare Before Christmas
Collage of Tim Burton’s The Nightmare Before Christmas: Oogies Revenge.

Presented in the style of Tim Burton with faux, stop-motion graphics and excellent voiceovers, the only thing that fails to make this package perfect is the ordinary gameplay. Most of the gameplay of Tim Burton’s The Nightmare Before Christmas: Oogie’s Revenge is based on fetch quests with lots of backtracking and repetition. 

You have to go back and forth through the same locations so many times that you begin to feel claustrophobic as you see the same environments over and over. There is no sense of freedom as exploring is relegated to linear paths. The only time you’ll feel like you have any kind of freedom is when you’re lost, and that happens a lot since not all of the missions are readily apparent.

Much of the focus of the gameplay revolves around the Soul Robber. With it you attempt to lasso enemies which you can spin around over your head and throw or slam them into walls or the ground. You can even use it like a whip and a spear.

To mix things up a bit there are some puzzles, musical mini-games and plenty of unlockables but some of the puzzles can be solved just by going back and forth to the area in question. If you can’t open a door, just wander around and come back a few times and it will open. This doesn’t work for all of them but the fact that it works for some of them tells you that something is wrong with the gameplay mechanics.

Final Thoughts

The gameplay fails to exploit Burton’s characters and locations to their fullest. What we have here is a generic game with a classic cast. The Soul Robber wasn’t even in the original movie and it’s not that great of an addition to the gameplay since it’s not very accurate and it’s quite stiff to handle. The tunes are excellent and there are plenty of songs to revel in. But this is a video game after all, and the gameplay is simply not good enough to compete with the production values. In conclusion this game is at the most worth a rental.

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