Ben 10 - Ultimate Alien - Cosmic Destruction

Every locked door in this game has a name attached to it. A flooded conduit wants Water Hazard. A high ledge wants Spidermonkey's web line. A slab too heavy to shift wants Humungousaur's shoulders. That is the design spine of Cosmic Destruction: the Omnitrix is not a menu of favourites but a ring of keys, and the level decides which one you reach for. It makes the transformation gimmick load-bearing instead of decorative, which is more than most cartoon licences of the period bothered with.

Papaya Studio built it for D3Publisher in 2010, at the tail end of the PS2's commercial life, when a Cartoon Network tie-in still shipped across six platforms and the PS2 build was the compact sibling rather than the showpiece. The structure is linear brawling and light platforming through globe-hopping stages, with wave arenas that seal the exit until the last drone falls. Combat is combo strings plus a heavy attack, tuned so that each alien feels distinct in weight rather than in depth. Armodrillo pounds the ground. Cannonbolt rolls. You learn the four or five useful strings quickly and then you use them for the rest of the game.

What holds up is the pacing of the alien swaps. The game rarely lets you settle, and the constant rotation papers over how thin any individual moveset is. The show's voice cast turns up, and the dialogue has the offhand rhythm of the series rather than the stilted line reads that licensed games usually settle for. Kids who watched Ultimate Alien in 2010 were getting something recognisably theirs.

What has aged badly is the camera and the platforming that depends on it. Jumps across gaps are judged from angles the game chooses for you, and a missed landing usually means a restart from a checkpoint that sits further back than it should. The arena fights outstay their welcome by a wave or two. Difficulty comes from the interface more often than from the enemies, which is the oldest sin in this genre.

It is a competent, unambitious afternoon of a game, and the honest measure of it is that the Omnitrix idea deserved a smarter box to live in. Still, there is something clean about a brawler that asks you to solve a room by choosing the right shape to become.