The story in Blues Brothers 2000 is very simple, and seems to just be there as an excuse to use the movie license. You take on the role of Elwood Blues, and your goal is to first escape from jail, so that you can eventually reform your band and enter a “Battle of the Bands” contest. But before you can enter, you have to find all the members of your band along with their instruments. Like any platformer, much of this game is based around collecting things, more specifically, money and notes. The money is pretty straightforward. If you gather 100 coins, you get an extra life. The musical notes are a bit trickier. There are 10 notes on each level that form a song when put together. You cannot go on to the next level until you have found all ten notes. This can get tedious on some of the later levels when the notes are harder to find, but it never gets too annoying.

What makes this game better than your average run-of-the-mill platformer is the amount of different moves and attacks that your character can pull off. You can throw your hat at enemies, Oddjob style; kick them using a break dance routine, jump attack them, slide attack them, and pound on them from the air; in addition to the standard jump and punch. All these different attacks give you a nice variety, which should relieve you from the monotony of platform jumping.

The biggest obstacle for developers of 3D platformers to overcome is how to get the camera to stay in a good spot for the player to view the character and his surroundings. In fact, this has been the downfall of many 3D platformers since their inception. Blues Brothers 2000 manages to hurdle that obstacle by giving the player a number of ways to adjust the camera. The camera can be moved from side to side using C-Right and C-Left (like in Mario 64) and can be zoomed using C-Down. Like in most N64 games, C-Up will give you a first person perspective. And the best feature of all, in my opinion, is that the camera can be centered behind the character by holding Z and pressing C-Down. With all these options, the camera is rarely a problem.

The graphics in Blues Brothers 2000 can only be described as lousy. I can’t go as far as to call them terrible, because everything is always visible in the game, and every item is easily recognizable. But the characters and backgrounds are very bland and hardly detailed at all.

Player 1 did their best to try and fit as many of the songs from the movie as they could onto the cartridge. But due to either time or money constraints, or maybe just laziness, all of the songs sound very poor, and don’t contain any lyrics whatsoever. For a game based on a movie that is based on music like Blues Brothers is, this is just unacceptable. The sound effects are unspectacular, but get the job done.

The biggest problem with Blues Brothers 2000 is its length… or lack of it. There are four ‘worlds’ in the game, each of which take no more than two hours to beat. An experienced platform player could beat Blues Brothers in as little as a day. And after you beat it, there isn’t really much to come back to. There is multiplayer game, called “Dance Contest” which consists of pressing A when a little light comes up. Kind of like Parappa the Rappa, only not nearly as fun. Once you try it out, you probably won’t play the two player again. This could be a worthwhile buy when it comes down in price, but it is certainly not worth $55. Especially not when you can buy classics like Mario 64 or Banjo-Kazooie for only $40 or less.

Fans of the Blues Brothers movies probably won’t like this game more than any consumer, because of how loosely they are related. And considering the game’s cartoon look, most adults will not be too interested in Blues Brothers 2000. Therefore, I can only recommend this game to younger children, or adults who don’t mind the ‘kiddy’ feel.