If you’ve ever played a cheap, generic, movie-licensed platformer before, you might as well stop reading now. The rest of this review will be pretty predictable. For those who are new to the phenomenon of cookie-cutter game development, by all means, read on!

Daredevil for Game Boy Advance is an obvious attempt to cash in on the movie’s release, and unfortunately, it will probably sell enough copies to warrant its existence, at least from the publisher’s point of view. Those of you who actually care about things like “fun gameplay” and “getting your money’s worth” should ignore it completely.

For the most part, Daredevil is utterly mediocre and predictable. The graphics and sound are passable but certainly don’t stand out, while the gameplay centers on running through mostly linear stages, collecting health items, and punching the bad guys to death. Being that Daredevil is an unusual superhero due to his blindness, you’d think at least the level design might take advantage of some of his skills and weaknesses. Nope. The Daredevil name and character in this game could easily be swapped out with Batman or any other non-flying, non-wall-crawling superhero and no one would know the difference. He jumps, punches, kicks, and swings his baton, which is basically just a slower punch. Sure, DD’s “radar sense” can be activated with the L trigger, but all it does is show hidden items. The power holds some excellent potential for innovative level and enemy design, but it has been totally wasted in this game. In the very few times a level features a secret passageway, the radar sense won’t even expose it. Ridiculous.

Combat is no-frills, with Daredevil’s moves being limited to a few punches and kicks with very limited range. His baton can be used at any time with the R trigger, but since it has no better range or damage and is a good bit slower than the punch, there’s simply no reason to use it. The collision detection is infuriatingly poor, and successfully killing enemies boils down to knowing how far away to stand from the goons and how long to wait to attack after they recover from your previous barrage. Most enemies in the game, including about half the bosses, can be killed simply by getting up into their faces and rapidly pressing the B button until they die. Ironically, nearly every level can be completed without killing a single enemy. Usually you can simply jump over their heads and keep running, and you’ll even have enough maneuvering room to pick up items along the way, if you should need them. Invincibility pick-ups often mean a ticket to running straight through half the stage, and after a few levels of this mind-numbing action game, you’ll be happy to make it through as quickly as possible.

A couple of the levels are relatively ambitious, featuring clever use of parallax scrolling to temporarily obstruct your view or using objects which you can hang on to traverse long gaps. However, the vast majority of the stages are quite straightforward, and a few of them are literally flat from beginning to end; the only jumps you’ll need to make are the ones that will carry you right over the enemies to avoid any boring combat.

Hidden throughout these levels are medkits (probably containing Percodan), baton upgrades that will let you throw the baton for a few seconds, temporary strength upgrades, invincibility pickups, and “DD” symbols. The DD symbols open up secrets if you collect all of them on a given stage, but the unlockables aren’t nearly worth the effort. Most of them are just still shots from the movie (the game contains no FMV). Some items are just floating in plain sight, while others are hidden and will require your radar sense to find and collect. When a hidden item is nearby, a little radar effect will emanate from Daredevil’s forehead. Since the radar power’s meter is long and regenerates quickly, there’s zero strategy in finding these “hidden” items. Just press L when the indicator turns on and collect. Only a scant few of the DD icons are difficult to find or reach, and the game offers little incentive to go out of your way to get them.

The final folly is Daredevil’s absurd lack of balance. Regular enemies barely change over the game’s thirty short levels, and even the machine gun-wielding Yakuza gangsters in the final stage can be killed with the same “tap B furiously” method as the first level’s equally stereotypical street thugs. Yet even the weakest enemies can nearly trap you if they attack in groups of two or three and manage to get you in the middle. The very first boss, Elektra, is considerably more difficult than the later villains like Bullseye and Kingpin, simply because she moves around so much. I finally beat her with a combination of lucky positioning and the same idiotic punch combo that dispatches the regular goons.

Daredevil is a complete waste of time and money. In the two or three hours it takes to beat the game, there isn’t a single moment of true entertainment or thrill. Do yourself and the industry a favor and buy something else.