The Fancy Pants Adventures Review

Far beyond sketchy.

Fancy Pants Adventures has a lot of charm. Its unique hand-drawn "squiggly" art style is sure to please; plus, it's a very fun and chaotic platformer to boot.

[image1]If you've played N+ or Super Meat Boy, you'll quickly get into the Fancy Pants groove since the platforming mechanics are similar to those titles. There's a slight slippery feeling to the way your stick figure friend runs around and sticks to walls during jumps, which makes the game a challenge of precision.

The stage layout in Fancy Pants is fairly straightforward; once you leave your skinny buddy's pad, you're off in a series of levels that take you through a barely written story but also ups the challenge in an even and satisfying pace. Once you're done with the story mode, you can go back and try to 100% all the levels. Doing this unlocks a bonus set of worlds that feature much more difficult sections to play through.

Combat, though, is the weakest part of Fancy Pants. At around the middle part of the single-player adventure, you'll unlock the power of the pencil. The pencil (or whatever you choose to use as a weapon in your wardrobe) works like a sword, giving you the ability to use weak and powerful attacks. Even so, there are very few instances of actual sword fighting. Taking a cue from Super Mario or Sonic, you can also 'bonk' enemies by jumping on top of them, which is also used for a lot of the platforming as well, letting you reach otherwise inaccessible corners of levels that usually contain a secret or two.

[image2]You might wonder how a stick figure can have much personality since it's well, a straight line with a circle for a head and a squiggly line of a toupé. But Fancy Pants constantly rewards you for doing well in the game, giving you different sets of clothing and weapons as you discover secrets and complete stages. Some of these rewards are hilarious, like a gigantic tiki mask that takes up much of your character's body.

For an almost insane variant of multiplayer, a set of special arcade challenges are available both online and offline, letting you take a buddy or three up on a series of competitions in order to reach a high score and come out on top.

Even though it isn't a long game, Fancy Pants Adventures oozes with charm. The platforming gameplay is easy to get used to and even though combat isn't really out of this world, there's little of it to push it into the negative. If you got some friends that are willing to tackle challenge mode along with you, there's a fair bit of extra content to skim through, as well as a ton of unlockables to go after.