If Jak and Daxter were spliced with The Sandman in a Legend of Zelda cloning lab, the result would look something like Dual Hearts, a charismatic cross between 3D platformer and RPG (just barely) that recalls everything from Alundra to Alice in Wonderland. Dual Hearts sets you in the role of Rumble (yes, you can change his name), a Ruinseeker by trade who befriends a rather large, clumsy, flan-loving, rabbit-eared dream-pig with the also-thankfully-changeable name of Tumble. Together, they must work together to find a scattered set of lost keys and orbs that link the dream world to our own by hopping into the minds of sleeping humans to solve the myriad crate-and-switch puzzles that plague their nightmares. Dual Hearts’ biggest blessing is the sheer variety of gameplay, a fusion of 3D platformer, adventure, and RPG elements from all across the board. In Link fashion, you must light torches, pull levers, and smack at icons using your every-growing arsenal of tools in order to collect keys and visit new dreams and temples; in Mario manner, you’ve got to gather collectible gold and silver things in order to unlock different doors and all sorts of game secrets; and in Banjo-Kazooie (or Ratchet and Clank, or Jak and Daxter) style, you’ve frequently got to hop on the back of your loveable, talking pig-rabbit and use his own unique set of abilities to make magic happen. Truth be told, with so many options and so few buttons (and fingers) with which to control them, Dual Hearts’ variety could have easily been its downfall. A helpful right-corner HUD, however, shows you exactly what button does what and when, and the game’s shoulder button lock-on targeting system (similar to the one in Zelda) makes the potentially confusing combat much easier to wrangle. Dual Hearts’ dream motif also gave the designers the opportunity to mix up the graphical variety a bit more than usual. A dog’s cartoon-simple dream of a backyard, for example, looks mightily different than the surreal Salvador Dali concoctions cooked up in an artist’s mind, while in the dream of a man who just broke his glasses, blurry double-vision effects occasionally pop up to make the platform-jumping and boss-battling a little more challenging. Unfortunately, the graphics are rather sloppy (apparently, Rumble dreams of frame-rate drops and messy-looking areas with reconstituted PlayStation textures), and the camera is hard to work with, frequently stopping against invisible barriers so that you have to wrestle with the thumbstick more than is really necessary. While Dual Hearts is forged from a giant jumble of other games’ ideas, it at least knew enough to primarily borrow the good ones and chuck out most of the bad. The result is an endearing action/platform/RPG mess with tons of variety, and its biggest problems lie mostly in the technical polish department. While you dream dreams of the upcoming Zelda, Dual Hearts should temporarily sate your real-world needs.
