I put off doing this review for a long time, I really did. There’s just so many ways I can say “I’m not a fan of 2D fighters”. Sure, I like them enough, at least more than other genres (like sports games), but to me, it just seems like it was the easiest thing to do for a time. If you had a license with enough characters remotely fighting related, you could make a fighting game. You just pick a move set for the characters made of random buttons, give them slightly different stats and add in the textures. Because of this, I prefer original fighting games like Mortal Kombat; at least then it seems like they’re trying, and that often leads to innovations and decent story. Otherwise, you can up with Shaq-Fu. Luckily that isn’t our topic; today’s game is Justice League: Task Force for the Super Nintendo Entertainment System.
Surprisingly, this game has a plot. I say surprisingly because (as you may have guessed), most of the playable characters are DC heroes, so getting them to fight one and other within a story should seem kind of weird. The options that come to mind on how to get this to happen is either don’t make it happen at all (like with Power Rangers Genesis) or come up with a really stupid reason why all the good guys want to fight you. They go with the second option here, but I’m getting a little ahead of myself.
The game starts off with a Newspaper image saying that Darksied is attacking earth. Your chosen hero decides to contact the other members of the Justice League. However, once they find one, they get attacked by them. We quickly learn that they are in fact robot clones put in by Darksied who has kidnapped the other heroes. Immediately this brings up plot holes; why wasn’t he able to catch this one hero? Why were the others unable to fight back? Do the heroes have no other way to contact each other rather than visiting each other face to face? Really it just doesn’t make sense and gets repetitive quickly, as your hero goes through the same lines every time.
It also doesn’t make sense depending on which hero you choose; the idea that Superman was captured by Darksied and the Green Arrow saves him a little ridiculous. In your roster, you have Superman, The Flash, Aquaman, Batman, Green Arrow and Wonder Woman in heroes and Darksied, Cheetah and Despro as villains (though you can’t choose them in story mode). And yes, I suppose you can say it’s cool to see who would win between Wonder Woman and The Flash, but when it comes to the point where Superman is made not so super, it takes away from all of that.
The game play isn’t at all bad really. It’s just not innovative or anything new at all as I’ve said. They basically took the usual fighting game format (two health bars pressing random buttons against each other) and skinned it with DC Heroes. However, I did look up the move list and found that a lot of the moves are easy and follow the same pattern of doing a quarter circle followed by either a punch or a kick. Now, having a few moves and characters that follow this wouldn’t be so bad, but after a while it gets pretty predictable. It doesn’t help that the move list is actually quite short for most characters (surprising given the material to deal with here). Again it takes away from the characters, but it also takes away from fighting games, as most fans of the style would prefer to be presented the challenge of having to learn new combos. Though, I do theorize that it could be for people new to the genre, but even then, the default difficulty would be too hard for them, so I don’t think that’s the case.
Justice League: Task Force is a game developed by Sunsoft and Blizzard Entertainment and published by Acclaim, and it pretty much feels it (Blizzard and Acclaim worked on Mortal Kombat, but then you throw in Sunsoft’s ability to produce “meh” titles). This game does look really good though, with each character looking bad ass and heroic, and the backgrounds are well detailed. But if you’re a fan of the DC heroes, you will be disappointed, as they don’t feel nearly as strong as they should be in relation to each other. However, I do not think this is a bad game, as I remember having lots of fun with this as a kid, at least to a certain point. It’s just easy to tire of quickly due to its small character roster and their limited and easy to learn moves. Nothing tips this game towards “bad” or “great” really, it remains a pretty ok game; and that’s why I put off talking about it really, because there’s nothing much to it. I give Justice League: Task Force for the Super Nintendo 6 levels out of 10.
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