Review: Voodoo Vince Remastered | What a time for platform lovers on Xbox, with Yooka-Laylee and now the remaster from Voodoo Vince, the genre is blooming again. Did the cute little voodoo doll age well? Let’s see what developer Beep Games did with the charming Voodoo doll!

THE GOOD

• Outstanding level design. You reach so many different places in the thirty or so linear levels that Voodoo Vince remains fresh and exciting. With some creepy and dark hallways, colorful and bright open cities and some overflowed rooms with water our voodoo doll doesn’t have an easy time reaching the ending point. What really stands out is the platforming parts, with yet gain some very clever level design. Jumping from eland heads to piano’s (accompanied with a sound effect) no effort was spared to give players something unique to play.
• What a tremendous soundtrack! It is such a joy to listen to some tracks, it allows you to dream away and forget that you are actually playing a video game. I’m not the guy that listens to jazz but I totally dig the Jazzy sound from Voodoo Vince, it totally makes sense too with the characters.
• Voodoo Vince could and should have been one of the Xbox mascots. I know it sold below expectations on the original Xbox and likely it won’t do very high numbers on Xbox One, but what a fantastic character. The doll has humor, attitude and more importantly, Vince is very recognisable for the audience.
• I was laughing multiple times about what Vince said or did. with fourth wall jokes, some clever dialogue and really funny special power moves. The jokes don’t feel forced and aren’t aimed for younger people.

MIXED FEELINGS

• A fun but short experience that doesn’t have a lot of replay value. Luckily all the collectibles allow gamers to spend some extra time in the jazzy world from Voodoo Vince but don’t expect more than ten hours of gameplay. That said, you have much shorter games on the Xbox Store and it will only set you back €15.
• Visually Voodoo Vince has never looked better, it’s a small disappointment that the game didn’t get a full visual update but the game still looks surprisingly well for such an old game. The high-definition jump makes the game a nostalgic beauty to look at.
• Like most games in the platform genre .. camera. It doesn’t always find a clear way to show Vince. Getting stuck behind walls or objects, you can manually control it fairly easy so the problems are quickly solved.

THE BAD

• Double jump doesn’t always works, you jump expecting to do a double jump but the animation doesn’t start. So you end up losing a life because the game didn’t register my double jump input. Unfortunately it happened more often than I wanted, resulting in some extremely frustrating gameplay moments.

Score: 82% | Voodoo Vince is a clear example that the original Xbox had some fantastic games. The remaster is a great platformer for Xbox One and still feels fresh after all these years. Beep Games…start your sequel please!