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The Smurfs 2: The Prisoner of the Green Stone is a 3D action platformer which we’re well used to, jumping through one landscape to another to get from A to B, while battling enemies along the way, and in this case, with additional side-quests set in purple-tinged worlds where the laws of gravity don’t always appear to apply.
The plot centres around the fact that Handy Smurf has created a new invention called the SmurfoMix. Alas, it needs one key ingredient: the Green Stone, owned by Gargamel. Collecting it from the big G’s lab is quite straight-forward. Alas, Handy Smurf has a cock-up on the Smurfomix front, it explodes, sending its fragments scattering throughout the Cursed Land. While that’s bad enough, as it can help destroy matter, it’s also had the result of freeing the evil Stolas, a new order bent on creating a reign of terror… a bit like the threat of new Tory government.
Hence, as the crack commando team of four Smurfs, you must set out to save the Cursed Land, get roid of Stolas (hence, boss battles), and use the SmurfoMix which can become equipped with different substances along the way, each of which will help in specific circumstances.
Plus, because reasons, Gargamel will become more of a help rather than a hinderance, for a change.
When it comes to the gameplay, it’s colourful and looks stunning, plus the camera control in this game is amongst the best I’ve seen, such that as you move around, if you’re to accidentally block he view of something in front of you, the game generally makes you almost invisible, so you’re not getting in the way of yourself.
However, there is occasional pop-in, even on a beefy PC like mine, and it’s odd how you don’t appear to be able to complete a section of a forest to 100%, before it throws you into the next one… unless I had and I just didn’t realise? I thought I would’ve got a congratultions if I had, though.
It does get repetitive, too, and it’s very annoying that for each play-through, you only have one ongoing save point, rather than multiple ones like a lot of games. Hence, about three hours in, both my AMD Adrenaline capture and OBS crashed (which was the backup recording), so I lost an hour of gameplay. Worse still, I can’t just go back and replay these specific areas!
Hence, I had to start from scratch and get to that point again. Yes, you can technically have three games in play at any one time – if there are multiple people wanting to play it – but each one is an ONGOING save file.
At the very least, you should be able to go back to the start of the latest area (eg. Heart of the Forest, Enchanted Lily), but since there are multiple autosave points along the way, EVERY SINGLE ONE OF THESE SHOULD BE AVAILABLE TO YOU!
Thanks to our friends at Microids for the review code for this game.
The Smurfs 2: The Prisoner of the Green Stone is out now on PS5, Nintendo Switch, PC/Steam, and PS4.
Important info:
- Developer: OSome Studio
- Publisher: Microids
- Players: single-player
PC specs:
- CPU: AMD RYZEN 9 7950X3D
- Motherboard: MSI MPG X670E CARBON WIFI AMD X670 S AM5 DDR5 PCIe 5.0 4x M.2 2.5GbE AMD EXPO™ ATX
- RAM: 64GB (2x32GB) Corsair DDR5 Vengeance RGB PC5-44800 (5600Mhz)
- Graphics Card: Sapphire Radeon RX 7900 XTX NITRO+ 24GB GDDR6 Ray-Tracing RDNA3 6144 Streams
- 1st Storage Drive: 2TB Samsung 990 PRO M.2 (2280) PCIe 4.0 (x4) NVMe SSD TLC V-NAND 7450MB/s Read 6900MB/s
Reviewer of movies, videogames and music since 1994. Aortic valve operation survivor from the same year. Running DVDfever.co.uk since 2000. Nobel Peace Prize winner 2021.