I played the original DuckTales game on my cousin’s NES way back in the day. However, I wouldn’t experience its sequel, 1993’s DuckTales 2, until adulthood. At that point, it was partially due to its already hefty (for the time) collector’s market price tag and my love of Capcom’s NES output.

1993 was a few years after the cartoon finished its initial run. I’m not sure what was up with licensed games at that time. Chip ‘n Dale Rescue Rangers came out during that series’ last year, with its sequel also arriving in 1993. It sometimes feels like developers used their source material because they felt it would make a good game, but then you remember how most licensed games weren’t good games. 

Not DuckTales 2, though. Mostly.

LIFE IS LIKE A HURRICANE

DuckTales 2 is the story about Scrooge McDuck and his insatiable lust for treasure and adventure. It’s something of a retread of the first game, but, I mean, what else do you do given the source material? 

Wait. I can answer that. It’s the same answer I give every time I think about how you could improve a game: business sim elements.

Narratively, the only wrinkle given to the first game is that Scrooge and the nephews are seeking parts of a map to… bigger treasure? The map is like the extra treasures from the original game. There’s one in each level, as well as a miscellaneous one. If you want the best ending, then you need to collect all the pieces of the map.

Structurally, however, it leans on the established formula. Once again, you tackle five levels in any order, searching for the end boss in each one.

RACECARS LASERS AEROPLANES

The money you gain from exploring and gathering treasure can finally be put to use in a store between levels, which is one place where the sequel improves on the original. There you can buy everything from extra lives to a safe that ensures you don’t drop all your hard-earned cash when you lose a life. There are even continues that you can purchase. Considering that one of my biggest complaints about the first game is the fact that losing all your lives forces you to start the game over, it’s appreciable. However, I never had to use a continue since I could just buy lives instead and had a sizeable stockpile by the end.

From a gameplay perspective, DuckTales 2 is a marginal improvement in almost every way. The levels feature the same level of exploration as the previous games, but they’re tighter in design. The graphics are also improved without losing the attention to detail found in the previous title. It’s not impressive (especially by 1993 standards), but it is a step up from 1989’s efforts.

The tighter levels, unfortunately, also make the game feel more constrained, but I wonder if I’m maybe just remembering wrong. By my recollection, DuckTales 2 feels a lot more linear than the previous game but, at the same time, there’s still a decent amount of exploration available; a healthy amount of secret areas to plumb for treasure. There’s still a bit of wall-humping as you try to eke out its secret passages, so people who are aroused by masonry should feel sufficiently stimulated.

Since money is meant to be spent this time around, the big reason for exploration is the map of McDuck. These aren’t necessary to complete the game, but they provide an extra bonus scene in the ending if you manage to collect them all.

D-D-D-DANGER (LURKS BEHIND YOU)

Another big upgrade to gameplay is additional uses for Scrooge’s cane. You can do everything you could in the first game, such as bounce on it like a Pogo Stick, but Scrooge can also latch onto certain blocks to pull them now. You also get upgrades throughout the levels that let you break certain blocks. It’s not a massive shake-up, by any means, but it does make the levels a bit more dynamic. It also provides incentive to return to a cleared level where you may have spotted something inaccessible without an upgrade.

But, I mean, it’s not a very ambitious sequel. I wouldn’t even compare the improvements to what went on between Mega Man games. As similar as they were, each Mega Man game had a slightly distinct feel, whereas DuckTales 2 is the same thing as its predecessor but slightly better. There’s no real distinctiveness.

Oh, there are puzzles. Some of them might require you to break out some paper to take notes. It’s funny that the puzzles fell out of my brain since that is one place where DuckTales 2 has a marked distinction from its predecessor.

THERE’S A STRANGER (OUT TO FIND YOU)

And that maybe shows in the fact that I have difficulty talking about DuckTales 2 without just describing the gameplay and making comparisons to the previous game. As a critic, I often tell myself that I can’t just tell you, the reader, that I get this “feeling.” I have to figure out where this feeling comes from and explain to you how the subject game communicates it to me. I am doing that right now. I am telling you what DuckTales 2 communicates to me: nothing. And that’s because it does nothing. Well, nearly nothing. I don’t think anyone is going to get excited with “like the first game, but with a few puzzles.”

I enjoy DuckTales 2 as a video game. It is a solid continuation of the first game. The developers working on it obviously cared enough to create something enjoyable instead of just phoning it in. However, there’s so little ambition here that it’s actually worse than if they tried something too ambitious and failed at it. The first DuckTales is unique in its pogo stick mechanic and the fact that it managed to be a good licensed game in a sea of bad ones. 

This is something you play after you’ve completed DuckTales and want more; it is not something you grab for an enriching experience.

6/10

This review was conducted on an NES using a cartridge version of the game. It was paid for by the author.