Scott Pilgrim doesn’t have the easiest life in the world. If it’s not a cabal of Evil Exes plotting to defeat him and monopolise the dating life of his love interest, Ramona Flowers, it’s a bunch of weird time travel shenanigans, as depicted in either Scott Pilgrim Takes Off or here in Scott Pilgrim EX. Largely unrelated to those events, Scott Pilgrim EX is a follow-up to Scott Pilgrim Vs The World: The Game, expanding on the ideas shown there to create a new beat ‘em up that’s mostly better, albeit with one big drawback.
The game opens in Toronto in the year 20XX, with Sex Bob-Omb kidnapped, leaving Scott and Ramona forced to call in back up from a bunch of former enemies. Stepping outside of band practice, Toronto has been ravaged by various time and space rifts caused by three major gangs: the Vegans, the Demons and the Robots, meaning you’ll need to save the day the only way Scotty P and the gang know how: battering everyone in sight.
Tribute Games builds off the formula established in the first Scott Pilgrim game, changing the level based structure for a full world map that opens up as you rescue bandmates and defeat bosses. The city of Toronto itself manages to feel familiar to those who played the first game, with the residential district into garages into the shopping district immediately bringing back memories of that first level of the original game. Even the music harkens back to those feelings, with Anamanaguchi once again knocking it out of the park on the soundtrack across the board.
The city itself is a beautiful thing to behold, with lots of characters and nods to the series and even other games/nerd culture as a whole thrown in. The design, especially in some of the backgrounds, feels like this version of Toronto just happens to also look like Mario, Sonic and Mega Man all at once. It’s that timeless pixel art style, combined with Bryan Lee O’Malley’s expressive character designs, that make this one of the more gorgeous beat ‘em ups on the market.
As for the gameplay, you control one of seven characters, with support for up to four players at once, as you explore the city trying to find various instruments and riffs needed to open the rifts that have popped up around Toronto. Try saying Riff Rift three times fast. At these rifts, you’ll find different versions of the city, along with some new takes on the characters you know and love, and there’s some genuinely brilliant moments here. You might be tired of time travel and multiverse stories by now, but this one is genuinely imagination led rather than just “multiverse because that’s the cool thing these days”.
Exploration in Scott Pilgrim EX feels like the natural evolution of the formula from the first game, because if you’re going to keep going back to level one to buy things from the shopping district, you may as well stitch everything together to create an explorable map. Admittedly, trekking across the city multiple times across the game’s twelve quests might get a bit samey across the game’s five to six hour runtime, but Toronto is also packed with plenty of secrets to find, including new assist characters and hidden rooms.
Where Scott Pilgrim EX falls down is the combat, specifically in its progression. The moment to moment brawling is fine, with plenty of tools and moves to get to grips with, and each of the game’s seven characters has their own moves and gameplay style to learn. The issue is that you get all those moves from the beginning. The first game had players learning new moves by earning EXP and levelling up, but here, levelling up just means upgrading your base stats. There’s no EXP to gain here, just pick-ups that level you up after beating a boss and the return of food items with stats upgrades. There’s also equipment to find, some of which alters the properties of your moves while others up your stats. Standard stuff.
Compared to the previous game, where each level up introduced a new move to your repertoire, Scott Pilgrim EX has no extra moves to learn beyond new assist characters. Given that you have to spend the majority of the game hunting down Sex Bob-Omb’s instruments, it could’ve been that each one gives you a new move in combat, but no. Coupling that with the return of the previous game’s method of “eating all the food to hit max stats halfway through the game”, it makes the back half feel a bit lacklustre by comparison.
Scott Pilgrim EX is still a great game though, and a wonderful beat ‘em up to play if you’ve got some friends to hang out with. It’s just that it’s a bit different from its predecessor, and it’s whether those differences are positive or negative for you. For us, there’s a lot of pros, but there’s one or two cons too. Maybe you’ll think it’s all good changes, or maybe you’d prefer the old one.
A PS5 key was provided by PR for the purposes of this review.
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