The Phantom is total throwback of a side-scrolling beat ’em up. That’s a fantastic idea on paper but what developer Art Of Play Interactive forgot was that we no longer live in the early 1990s in terms of design. There’s a charm to a game looking like a throwback of games of the genre like Final Fight and Streets of Rage with modern visuals (see Streets of Rage 4), but in the 30+ years since the genre was in its prime the industry has evolved leaving much of the design elements of The Phantom behind.
The Phantom really does look like love letter to classic arcade beat-em-ups of the early 1990s. You jump into the shoes of the legendary comic character The Phantom or his equally capable partner, Diana Palmer, as you face off against the sinister Singh Brotherhood. These feared pirates are hellbent on seizing power and destroying The Phantom’s legacy, and it’s your job to stop them through 14 stages of nostalgic comic book action.
The game looks fantastic and there is a lot of gorgeous art all throughout. But this is the perfect example of a “window shopping” sort of game. The screenshots look fantastic, almost like mini works of art that invoke the WayForward style of hand-drawn art, but the problem is that when everything starts moving the game starts lurching along a bumpy track. Animations tend to be jittery and jerky, combat is bland with iffy hit detection and missed audio cues, and the controls are overly complicated for such a simple style of gameplay. When people say a games controls “take a little getting used to” they are usually talking about some complex game and not referencing an arcade beat ’em up.
The gameplay itself is a mix of hand-to-hand combat and weapon-based action, with a unique twist: you can call in your loyal animal companions, Fraka the falcon and Devil the wolf, to assist in battle. These moments do add a nice layer of flair, making each encounter feel dynamic and helping to mix up the button mashing. Again, visually the game looks ripped straight from the comics and captures the feeling of The Phantom amazingly well. The art is top-notch and animations themselves are fine but they feel slightly out of sync/delayed leading to a very jittery feel. Attacks are also spread out across several buttons with one for punching, one for kicking, and one for jumping.
You’ll also be crouching to pick up weapons and collectables, but unlike every other game that lets you simply walk over items to collect them or hit the attack button to pick them up, The Phantom has a dedicated “pick-up” button that is more confusing than helpful. The game often felt like I was playing Twister with my controller, especially early on. You also have access to your famous pistols that are themselves mapped to the shoulder buttons alongside your special that you can use when the meter is full. There is a lot going on here for such a straightforward game, but it also sort of feels like the art was the priority and the gameplay came second.
What does help set The Phantom apart is its commitment to honoring the classic license. The game features a brand-new story officially approved by King Features, ensuring it stays true to the beloved comic book lore. The narrative unfolds through beautifully crafted hand-illustrated and animated frame-by-frame by a team of artists and Art of Play’s in-house 2D creative team. The result is a visually striking experience that feels like looking at a living, breathing comic book.
So, it’s a real shame when you constantly see the same enemies over and over again. Repetition in these sorts of games is always a problem, but when the enemies feel far too repetitive only a few stages in we have a problem. It also sucks that there doesn’t seem to be a way to cancel out of a move, something that leads to a lot of unnecessary hits, especially when in a combo. And don’t get me started on the throws that sometime feel as if the game freezes up while waiting for one to finish.
There are a lot of issues with The Phantom at the time of this writing, but that doesn’t mean I hate the game, or even had a bad time playing it. There have been other side-scrolling beat ’em ups that do far worse than this one. But the one thing that does kill the experience are the amount of bugs that hurt the fundamentally hurt the game. In the very first stage of the game I experienced a glitch with the first sub-boss where he got knocked off the screen and woke up stuck just slightly out of frame. I had no idea of this and ended up spending nearly ten minutes fighting generic mobs that kept walking in until I was dead, all because the boss wasn’t dead. Then in the same stage I got stuck in the environment seemingly at random (see above).
I know the team has pushed out a couple of small updates that look to fix a lot of these issues, but the game simply wasn’t ready for prime time in its current state. A lot of the issues The Phantom has I can overlook thanks to my love of the character and the beat ’em up genre, but I can’t overlook game breaking issues less than ten minutes into my experience. What I can say is that the team is listening (unlike some AAA studios I can name) and working to make the game better. It’s because of this that I say wait on picking up The Phantom if you are on the fence, or at worst wait for it to go on sale. I just hope they can get all of this worked out as the team has another beat ’em up based on the Lady Death comics coming out next year that I’ve been keeping an eye on.
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