Five arcade games featuring characters from the Wreck-It Ralph movie

Wreck-It Ralph is a collection of five mini-games based loosely on the Wreck-It Ralph movie.

What games make up Wreck-It Ralph?

Wreck-It Ralph boasts five different casual games. It feels like the kind of games compendium that was popular in video games of the late 80s and early 90s. The games are as follows:

Fix-It Felix Jr – A reworking of the original retro game of the 1980s. In itself Fix-It Felix was a glorified copy of games like Donkey Kong. You control Felix, who must jump from platform to platform, repairing parts of the building that Wreck-It Ralph has destroyed. All the while you need to avoid the crates being thrown down at you by Ralph.

Sugar Rush Sweet Climber – A slushy remake of Doodle Jump in which you must collect candys by bouncing from plant to plant in a strange sugary world. The game stars Wreck-It Ralph as the main character and there are lots of power-ups to enjoy, although little innovation in terms of the game format.

Hero’s Duty – A top-down shooting game in which you must blast the hoards of strange glowing birds which are trying to attack you. Armed with only a gun you must move quickly and spin through 360 degrees to wipe out all the enemies, without draining your health bar. Weapons can be upgraded by unlocking the power-ups.

Turbotime – A very simple, yet addictive, racing game in which you compete against three other karts over a series of tracks. The object of this top-down racer is to get around each circuit first, using speed boosts and collecting coins along the way.

Hero’s Duty Flight Command – An endless scrolling shooter where you take control of a space ship and must blast objects and enemies that get in your way.

All of these mini-games are fun in their own way and provide a distraction for a while. However, there’s precious little in the way of original gameplay ideas in any of them.

Taking control

The controls in the five games that make up Wreck-It Ralph are pretty straightforward. Each game features its own control system, rather than utilizing a generic on-screen joypad for all.

Fix-It Felix Jr relies on a directional pad and action button combo; in Sweet Climber you simply swipe from side to side to hit the platforms and spring up; Hero’s Duty uses separate joysticks for movement and rotation (which is fiddly to say the least); Turbotime gives you a choice of arrow buttons or a steering wheel for turning; and Hero’s Duty Flight Command employs a very simple move and shoot mechanism.

Back to the old school

Wreck-It Ralph is strange in a sense because the look of the mini games don’t really share the same style. Fix-It Felix Jr, for example, goes for a strictly retro 80s look, while Sweet Climber and Hero’s Duty adopt the modern look of today’s mobile games. Turbotime is neither one nor the other. It feels like a retro game, but it’s actually just that the graphics are very basic.

The verdict

Wreck-It Ralph is a real mishmash of different games. The five titles you can choose from are fun to play in their own right, and yet none of them will blow you away with anything particularly new or exciting.

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