Phantom 2040

With the time between new Genesis games growing steadily longer, a solid action/adventure cart like Phantom 2050 is a slight for sore eyes and a great workout for idle hands. Go rumble in the jungle with "The Ghost Who Walks".

Phantom 2040 is a welcome arrival for the cart-starved SNES faithful; this game is an excellently crafted action/adventure. As the Phantom says, "Someone has to care!" Viacom apparently does.

At first glance, I thought this would be another basic side-scroller. One you play it though, you'll realize there is plenty of technique, like using the Inductance Rope to scale walls (a nice touch). Another surprising factor is how well Phantom 2040 plays. The control is perfect! Although the animation of him walking appears painfully stiff and the enemies of seem to pop out of nowhere, there is a lot to like about this game, especially with the wide array of weapons to use.

On the plus side, the game is pretty big and very open ended. The storyline is relatively non-linear - there are times you can go pretty much anywhere and you get a choice every now and then to affect which way the game goes. But when all is said and done, Phantom 2040 comes up in the middle of the 'mostly harmless' category.

At the dawn of the 32-bit era, 16-bit cartridges need to have a lot of special features to attract attention. A game like this might have attracted more attention two years ago, but now it just doesn't cut it. I'm glad it's not another run-of-the-mill one-on-one fighting game, but I'm not very excited about the fact that it's another run-of-the-mill platform game.