Is it fair to call Comix Zone smart if many of the players fail to pick up on the ways to progress through the level without killing themselves? that is to say, people going into a beat\'em up aren\'t expecting inventory puzzles. That seems like a communication error on the part of the game by not making its lateral thinking element more obvious game element.
I remember the demo of this game being super hard, and this was back in the day before there was internet who could give you advice on how to play.
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I\'d say it can be compared to Doom, as one also wouldn\'t expect keycard puzzles in a shooting game either. In Comix Zone most obstacles are made easy by just letting the rat do its thing on the preceding or even the same panel. The exception is the first door on page four, triggered by hanging onto a scaffolding, which is legitimately tricky to notice. Still, as the main complaint I\'ve seen is that the game is made too hard by how punching objects hurts, I find this is alleviated by the knowledge that it\'s actually a puzzle where these obstacles have to be circumvented otherwise.
My only real complaint with the game is it\'s just so short. I used to run through it in life half and hour back in the day. Still one of my favorite games ever on my Sega.
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A Masterpiece Mired in Misconception
Aside from everything you'd find in any other review of the game - the gorgeous graphics, the awesome music, the gameplay more akin to a fighting game than a beat'em up - there is one element that most reviews touch upon, and that's the game's intense difficulty... an impression I feel I should dispel.
Comix Zone isn't a very hard game. On the surface, it looks like a standard brawler, and it almost plays like one. But then there's a bunch of boulders that our hero Sketch has to punch through, and unlike any other game out there, punching the scenery hurts. By the time he's plowed through a reinforced door, he's taken more of a beating than in the preceding boss fight. What kind of a game does that?
It doesn't. Because for every stack of oil drums he has to go through, there's a corresponding stick of dynamite earlier in the page. It's either in a box, or hidden in the page itself, for Sketch's trusty rat companion to sniff out. And if there's no such treasure around, there's probably a secret mechanism to open the door anyway. If Sketch is too heavy to flip a switch without stepping on a mine, Roadkill the rat can do it for him. If the switch is too far to reach altogether, a thrown knife will do the job. Even the bosses have intentional weaknesses to make them go from nightmarish to easily taken out. And the regular enemies can block punches till the cows come home, but a well timed throw turns them into bruised potato sacks just the same.
Comix Zone isn't a very hard game. It is, however, a very smart game that encourages lateral thinking and full use of the environment, inventory, and a two-pound rat with two thousand volts in its tail. If mentions of the game's difficulty are the only thing preventing people from trying it, whether on a dusty old cartridge or a virtual copy for a new generation console, then put those fears to rest, read the manual, and start throwing mutants around.