Good reviews brought me to this game and I was gladly surprised. It’s a good 3D platformer with great level design and gorgeous visuals. It’s short but leaves room for completionists. Don’t judge this book by its cover.

🎮 Played on Steam Deck

Rating: 🍄🍄🍄🍄▫️

Somewhere in there is a good game. Unfortunately it drops the ball in a lot of places.

The graphics are nice but the frame rate is trash, even on the ps5.

Some gameplay elements like your powers and their upgrades can be really fun. The game designers knew what they were doing but this feels super rushed.

Too much handholding, too few areas, you never get a satisfying end to the main story or even see Azrael the cat. Also the lack of a decent map kills the point of going for 100%.

A great licensed hidden gem based on an IP I haven't thought about in years.

The game mainly pulls from Super Mario Sunshine with The way the Smurfizer gun works, but its handled in a way where all the abilities are unified to one weapon.

Very fun game, don't miss out on it!

this game genuinely pleasantly surprised me! i watched the trailer, thought it looked okay but figured it wouldn't be all that fun but i had a pretty fun time. nothing stands out as good to be clear, it doesn't do anything particularly well (and does some things bad) but nothing was egregiously bad and it's mostly all okay.

the bad mainly is the voice acting and general writing. i realize it's a kids game but man the writing is just straight up annoying most of the time. they talk SO much, and maybe i'm giving the smurfs too much credit but in the small amount of smurfs content i've consumed i've never been this annoyed at them replacing smurf with words. it felt way more shoe horned and obnoxious here, but maybe it's cause it was 7 hours of it over like 1:20 in a movie. the voice acting also just isn't very good. the main smurfs are acceptable but still don't sound great, but the little side smurfs are REALLY bad lol. it would have been better if they had no lines for sure. presentation wise i actually don't have much negative to say but the little renders that show up when smurfs talk are pretty ugly and bad. the biggest negative though is there's a shocking amount of combat in the game and it's incredibly unfun. it only ramps up as the game goes on with more annoying enemies and more waves of enemies. it feels terrible to fight enemies, the smurfizer overheating makes it super tedious and obnoxious, on top of there being no good feedback when you're hitting an enemy and enemies having slightly too much health it's just a huge chore.

the good is that it actually looks pretty solid! it's got b/c tier game feel here and there and it's mostly just like 2 biomes but they look pretty solid and the models and such are good. i also think the menus and stuff are pretty good, and the little hand built feel the menus have is a cute touch too, pretty charming! it feels fine to play (not bad but not like noticeably fun to run around) and the smurfizer (the backpack) while very clearly being ripped from luigi's mansion and mario sunshine but significantly less cool/satisfying compared to those is still a fun gimmick for a platformer. the glide and especially the dash are really fun and the upgrades you get feel fun and nice to get. cleaning the world up feels good as well, and again is very mario sunshine inspired but it's satisfying to see the corruption disappear as you clean the area around it. there's actually some decent little challenges for optional pickups and the timers are surprisingly tight and i found it pretty satisfying to do those! a small side thing, there's some weird jump timing mechanic, where if you time the jump as you land you get a weird glowy effect and there's a counter for how many times you do it in a row. i'm not sure what it was, it seems to give you absolutely nothing (you don't go any higher) but it was kinda fun for when i was just running to a point with nothing to do while i did lol.

there's nothing super special here, and unless you LOVE the smurfs i don't think it's worth more than like 5/10 bucks but i was pleasantly surprised. i will say i played on amazon luna (sidenote, cloud gaming is at a crazy point man it worked so flawlessly lol) so playing it essentially free might help that feeling but it was a good time! i love me a below average b tier platformer, and this hits that sweet spot perfectly for me.

Unironically a totally fine 3D action-adventure collectathon. Simple but fun platforming mixed with a surprisingly compelling "purifying" mechanic and the occasional clumsy combat encounter. This felt more engaging to me than last year's The Gunk which had very similar game design and mechanics, maybe due to the more vibrant color palette. The narrative is whatever, I enabled the French voices so that the smurfs' chatter wouldn't be so annoying. But more likely than not, most people aren't playing this for a gripping story but rather the throwback 3D-platformer gameplay it offers.

The Smurfs: Mission Vileaf - which I kept reading as "Vile-as-fuck" in my head - really is a solid, smaller budget title that wears its influences quite proudly on its sleeve. If you've already depleted the limited supply of major modern 3D action-adventure platformers and you've been mildly intrigued by this one just do as I did and give it a chance, it's a fun enough one of those. It's nice to see that these more recent licensed games aimed at younger audiences aren't all complete duds. The Marsupilami platformer from the same publisher is also worth checking out, here's my review on it.