Pucca Power Up Review (Nintendo DS)

Pucca power focuses on Pucca, a 10-year-old girl who is in love with Garu, a 12-year-old ninja. Yeah, it is a bit weird, but it is all done in a sort of kid friendly way so don’t really worry about any weirdness if you are considering this for your child. There is a bit of violence but it’s animated and perversely satisfying whne you whack someone or something with a large metal bag. It is a Disney company though if that helps.

Pucca is chasing Garu who doesn’t seem at all interested in her advances and so uses his ninja skills to evade her. However, the tables are turned later but I won’t spoil it.

Basically, Pucca Power is a side-scrolling platformer that has a bit of combat action and some environmental puzzles including doors and switches. As far as platformers goes it’s a decent little title. There’s nothing groundbreaking and the graphics are that sort of standard Nintendo DS style from when the platform was fairly new.

So what that means is that they are blocky and not amazingly interesting. In fact the entire game is like that, decent but not amazing.

The sound also does an adequate job of getting the message across but really doesn’t inspire one in any way.

Overall, the game is good representation of a platform title on the Nintendo DS, however, it rarely ever uses the second screen aside from information display and has one, infrequent, use of the actual touch screen. What it feels like is that they were making this game to be a download title but then decided on a full release. It doesn’t even really feel like it was made for the Nintendo DS as it doesn’t effectively use the two main features of the platform, the two screens and the touch interface.