Destructoid review: Loco Roco Cocoreccho

The sequel to the PSP’s smash hit Loco Roco, the PSN title Loco Roco Cocoreccho returns us to the sickeningly sweet and diabetes-inducing world of these Loco Rocos. The original title had you flinging these blob-like beings throughout the stage as you tilted and tipped their world about.

Utilizing the Sixaxis controls, SCEJ brings us Cocoreccho in a simultaneous release with Japan. With the transition from handheld to console, and the implementation of the Sixaxis, how does the title hold up?

I’ll admit, I’ve never played the original Loco Roco beyond a scant five minutes at Circuit City. I’m familiar with the basic concepts of how the game works, but as for the intracacies of it, I’m not too knowledgable about the mechanics.

The game looks absolutely beautiful. On a nice large widescreen, everything really comes out, and it’s a bit of a visual feast. I may just be a whore for vectored graphics, but it’s certainly a great job done, and works well for the game. The audio that accompanies the game is sugary-sweet, so much that I feel as though I’ve been transported back to Disneyland and I’m eternally riding through “It’s A Small World” (which I still love).

The game feels fundamentally different from the original Loco Roco, though. Instead of tilting the world about with the Sixaxis controls and moving the Loco Rocos that way, you move around a butterfly, sending out a signal that attracts the little critters. If they’re outside your range, then they’ll start wandering away.

The Sixaxis comes into play when you’ve reached obstacles, or if there are Loco Roco in the trees. You can shake the controller to dislodge them from their napping location, and you can tilt the controller to adjust platforms. It can become difficult managing a stage when you’re trying to move the butterfly and get the Loco Rocos to follow you, while tipping the controller to a certain angle in order to move the pieces along to their goal.

The game seeks to do too much with all the buttons available, along with the Sixaxis controls. If it was left solely to the Sixaxis, I feel as though the game would be fine. This sort of situation has been proved with flOw already, where the Sixaxis controls dominate play, and the buttons only serve a secondary function. 

In order to progress from area to area, you must collect a certain number of the blob beings and drop them onto a platform that raise, which counts the number of Loco Rocos on it. When there are enough, the gate opens, and the game continues. If you don’t have enough, time to go through the stage again and collect more.

It can be rather tiresome trying to keep a large group together when all the Loco Rocos won’t combine into larger blobs. The game is more akin to Lemmings than the original Loco Roco. You spend a lot of your time trying to manage the groups of Loco Rocos, instead of just enjoying the game as a fun playland. While the butterfly’s range does take up a good third of the screen, it just isn’t enough to keep them all together.

The design of each stage that you play through, though, is very good. It’s rather large, although going through each part doesn’t take too long. As you progress, though, there are additional areas to pick up more and more Loco Rocos, and so spending time in the stages can be more rewarding if you have to go through it multiple times.

The game strives to be a fun sequel to the original Loco Roco, but because of poor controller implementation, the game becomes more of a chore than the original was fun. When talking to fans of the original game, they agreed that it wasn’t really fun. If you were a hardcore Lemmings fan, then this might appeal to you, but for the masses, this isn’t going to be a lot of fun.

Final score: 5.5/10
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