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This is your team, feel free to panic now

A hilarious game by Planet Moon Studios, the same people who made Giants: Citizen Kabuto, who in turn were the same people who made MDK while working at Shiny Entertainment. Featuring a cast of misfits battling though a living parody of Britishness to pull off the ultimate heist and maybe while they're at it, save the world. Your group consists of the smelly, blind seer Rexus, a tea drinking robot named Q, as well as Jonesy, a moleman with a little too much interest in explosives. Your role is the protagonist, Roman, who may or may not have really bad teeth.


This game provides examples of:

  • Abnormal Ammo: The famous LAND SHARK GUN: it does what it says, firing a shark that swims through the ground and devours as many enemies as it can. It is great at destroying a lot of enemies and acts a good distraction due to the enemies trying to attack the shark, though you can't fire another until the first shark is done.
  • Anachronism Stew: You're wielding a machine gun and fighting people with bows and arrows. There are zeppelins and fixed artillery, but no land-vehicles. Sentient or Semi-sentient robots for farming and fighting use conventional weapons. Your jetpack enables you to fly over pre-industrial style blast-furnaces. Armies try to overcome you in a siege by putting ladders up against your wall while you fire mortars at them.
  • Ambiguously Human: Stig is the son of Forge who is a human, but looks like an ogre or troll. This can potentially be explained by the curse that afflicted him with his stupidity.
  • Awesome, but Impractical: To a degree, many of the more spectacular/hilarious weapons have extremely limited ammo, forcing you to frequently rely on the generic SMG and Rifle. They are still super useful, just don't expect to use them too often.
  • Baa-Bomb: At one point, Jonsey has to disarm an explosive sheep. He doesn't succeed.
  • Big "NO!": Parodied by Rexus once again- he screams this when the Wild Wood Monk tells Roman he's more or less The Chosen One. He follows up by apologizing.
  • Black Comedy: Quite a bit, actually. The leper colony, for starters.
  • Blind Seer: Rexus. No vision, powerful second sight, little common sense or hygiene.
  • Boring, but Practical: Despite all the weird and wacky weapons in the game, you're usually best off just mowing down enemies with the machine gun.
  • Carcass Sleeping Bag: When Rexus is semi-delerious from hypothermia (although with him it's hard to tell), Q attempts to warm him up with an "old army trick". Except he doesn't cut the rhino-horse thing open with a knife, but... well, takes a shortcut. And then it goes From Bad to Worse!
    Q: "Works better when they're dead."
  • Cheese-Eating Surrender Monkeys: Rexus manages to get his Jedi Mind Trick powers to work on two troopers, but is unsure what do to tell them to do. He eventually improvises and tells them that they are French. The troopers immediately drop their weapons, scream "WE SURRENDER!", and then run away as quickly as possible.
  • A Child Shall Lead Them: Lily in a sense. After the great heist of the Book Of Rule, she reappears to be kidnapped again and again while trying to fulfil the prophecy.
  • The Ditz: Stig barely seems to understand what is going on half of the time.
  • Dumb Is Good: Quite literally. A curse on the royal line of Forge makes every generation alternate between Evil Genius and Kindhearted Simpleton. The current king Forge is evil, his son Stig is a good-natured idiot: King Forge wants the book of rule partially to undo this sad state of affairs.
  • Dumb Muscle: Stig is an absolute idiot, but incredibly strong.
  • Enigmatic Empowering Entity: The Lady of the Pond. Jonesy ends up beaning her with a skipping rock.
  • Even Evil Has Loved Ones: Forge is a ruthless and heartless tyrant, but he sincerely loves his son Stig and is remarkably patient with his stupidity.
  • Gameplay and Story Segregation: The cutscenes and the levels often have only a tangential relationship to each other. In a more direct sense of the trope, you'll notice that Roman never has the jetpack in cutscenes that you can pick up in the game.
  • Gravity Screw:
    • A corkscrew that can reverse gravity is just one of the crazy weapons this game has to offer.
    • Quite literally, in fact. The Topsy-Turvy Bomb, as it's called, is an anti-gravity device mounted on a big corkscrew with handles. Anti-gravity cars were in development with these, but when activated, they would just lift off into space. The Empire decided this would make a good weapon, and thus, by latching onto the ground and activating, the bomb quite literally reverses gravity for anything touching the ground in a large field of effect for long enough to kill them from Falling Damage. Thankfully, your squadmates don't have to worry about this.
  • Healing Checkpoint: The pubs serve double duty as save points and health/ammo restore points.
  • Improbable Weapon User: A shark gun, miniature black holes and magnets combined with boxing gloves, and don't forget the Corkscrew Bomb as explained in the Gravity Screw entry.
  • Instrument of Murder: There's a mortar launcher in the game that looks like a Tuba.
  • Jedi Mind Trick: Parodied by Rexus—he tries this on the troops of Forge who invade his home to capture him. He only succeeds in retrieving a table. Later on, he tries it again on a different set of troops and succeeds, convincing the soldiers they are, in fact, French.
  • Mondegreen Gag:
    • One cutscene involves a man with a gun demanding Roman, Q, Jonesy, and Rexus give him the Keys of Zardos. However, because of the man's accent, Rexus thinks he's asking them to give him a kiss, so Rexus kisses him.
    • When Roman and his gang try to ransom Stig, they have to pass the message through the King's messenger Sparks, who's rather hard of hearing and keeps misinterpreting them (like hearing "We have Lamaze classes for the King" instead of "We have demands for the king"). King Forge eventually gets fed up with this and throws Sparks off the battlements before asking what the heroes want himself.
  • Mutilation Interrogation: The first prisoner had his tongue removed, but still wouldn't talk.
  • Mushroom Samba: Implied after Jonesy, Q, Roman and Rexus drink their own urine after crash-landing in the desert.
    • Stig experiences this after swallowing an entire bottle of pills. King Forge appears before him as a talking penguin.
  • My Local: Pubs serve as places to restock on ammo and weapons, heal up and overhear gossip. You can also trade out some weapons here and pick up dynamite.
  • Numerical Hard: Enemies have additional health on hard difficulty. The change is enough in one of the final missions to require you to retreat and resupply mid-battle.
  • Paper-Thin Disguise: Rexus's efforts to disguise himself consist of fitting his glass eyes into his sockets and... that's it. It doesn't help that when we see this in action, the eyes are looking in completely opposite directions.
  • Power Trio: Q as the Superego, Roman as the Ego, Jonesy as the Id. Rexus also sort of fits the Ego mold.
  • Rags to Royalty: Roman, Snow White style, not that he knows it. Lily becomes queen at the end.
  • Shout-Out: The game is littered with them- from Star Wars to The Lord of the Rings. It's great fun trying to find them all.
  • Spiritual Successor: To MDK, another comedic shooter from the same creators, with virtually the exact same sort of interface, gameplay and style of humor. It even includes a shout-out to the original, with the World's Smallest Black Hole taking its name from MDK's World's Smallest Nuclear Explosion.
  • Sudden Musical Ending: "I'll be home with the Book of Rule / So save the last pint for me!"
  • There Is No Kill Like Overkill: The gameplay, self-evidently.
  • Video Game Cruelty Punishment: Destroying the homes of hapless villagers will often trigger a comment from your comrades and a reduction from your final score. Assuming you care about your score, that is.
  • Weapons That Suck: The black hole in a cardboard box.
  • We Cannot Go On Without You: If either Jonsey or Q have their life bars depleted, then they are simply unavailable for the rest of the level. If Roman goes down, however, then it's game over. On one of the extra missions, you need to keep both of them alive (but can order them to wait where they are.)
  • Your Mom: A random extra says one of these, but then it turns out he was actually being serious. In fact, he was sleeping with Jonesy's Mom.

 
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I'm Running of Power!

Held up by armed soldiers, Rexus tries to sway them away with magic, but struggles to come up with any suggestions.

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5 (3 votes)

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Main / JediMindTrick

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