Tricktastic fun from the PS3’s very first combo-’em-up.

Joe Danger is the first game from the 4-man team at Hello Games, pitching you as a stuntman whose career has gone off the rails after a huge accident. By working your way up through a range of increasingly tricky events your task is to get the stadiums full and make Joe a massive name again.

Simple!

Well, no. While Joe Danger’s genius is in its simplicity and easy access, there’s a deep challenge which extends far further than you could initially imagine. It’s very possible to get a fair distance into the single player game just by getting from start to finish, but if you want to hit the big time you’ll need to be performing stunts and tricks at every opportunity, chaining them together to create huge combos and massive scores.

Luckily, Hello Games have made Joe incredibly easy to control. You’ll quickly get to grips with the controls, allowing you to speed up a ramp and perform a triple backflip while sitting on the handlebars without even giving it a second thought. When you hook several of these up in quick succession your score continues to rise, with the combo multiplier making your sequence even more rewarding. At the end of each level you’re automatically shown your score alongside those on your friends list, which starts off as a nice touch then quickly turns into a mild obsession as you replay the levels repeatedly trying to beat your friends. It’s seriously addictive.

There’s plenty to keep you busy while you’re doing all these tricks; each level has its own objective, be it a certain score or collecting every star or coin on a level. There are big targets to land on, time trials to beat, levels requiring you to keep a combo running for the entire duration, and bewildering combinations of any of these. You’ll even get to become a human bowling ball by flying off a ramp into some oversized bowling pins to knock them all down. Loads of variety, and a good challenge from a series of spikes, shark pools and other dangers that will stop you in your tracks. It’s a quality single player campaign, and will keep you busy for longer than many games four time as expensive might.

But there’s also a split-screen multiplayer mode, and playing against someone else in the room is great fun. Beating each other’s times and scores adds another dimension to the game as well as a serious competitive edge. It’s slightly disappointing that this is only offline though – the single player mode offers races against 3 other riders and it seems like an obvious option to include an online multiplayer mode, but it’s a good laugh anyway.

The other aspect of Joe Danger is the Sandbox mode. Here you can create your own course from scratch using the fairly comprehensive toolbox of ramps, obstacles and so on, or at any point in a level freeze the action to move ramps and other items into more helpful positions. Some stages actually need you to do this before you can make a certain jump, like getting yourself over a row of buses. It’s incredibly easy to use and lets you put together a pretty cool set of jumps and hazards in around 10 minutes. These can then be played split-screen, alone or sent to your friends to see if they can beat your score. Trust me, getting your score beaten on your own level is quite embarrassing. If the single player score tables were addictive, this is something else. It’s a slight shame that the only way to share your creations is by sending it to your friends as a PSN message, there’s no LBP-esque online level browser, but it’ll still add hours onto the game and give you chance to create your ideal stunt track.

Graphically everything looks brilliant. Sprites and backgrounds burst with colour, and wherever you look there are neat touches and wonderful animations to be seen. The sound too is equally charming, as the crowds cheer, the announcer calls your name and the impossibly catchy background music lodging itself firmly in your head for hours after you stop playing. For a PSN game, and especially one from a brand new developer, it’s fantastic. Hugely impressive.

Gamers have always been driven by a high score table. In the early days of console gaming, it was all we had. Everything in my early gaming life revolved around beating my brother’s scores, getting round a circuit in a faster time or, looking back as far as the Spectrum, fending off more flying bowling ball things on IK+. Joe Danger takes this concept, turns it up to 11 and makes it look and feel like nothing else on the PS3. There hasn’t been a game this addictive for a long long time, and you’ll be playing for weeks, months even, trying to top your friends’ scores, especially if they start doing the same. It’s a pity about the lack of online multiplayer, but apart from that it’s almost impossible to fault Joe Danger. It’s £9.99, one of the best PSN releases I’ve played and deserves pride of place on everyone’s PS3.

Hello Games, I salute you, with a quadruple backflip, superman pose and perfect landing.

9/10

Review by Iain Alexander