The Smurfs 2: The Prisoner of the Green Stone is the sequel to The Smurfs: Mission Vileaf, developed by OSome Studio and published by Microids. It is available now across PlayStation 4 and 5, Nintendo Switch, Xbox One, Xbox Series S and X, and PC.

Handy sets off to Gargamel’s home, looking to acquire a piece of a magical green stone that he needs for his latest invention. Breaking off a piece, he accidentally sets Stolas free from the stone, putting the whole forest in danger, and now they need to team up with Gargamel to stop this new threat to the forest. Players will jump into action as one of four characters; Storm, Handy, Dimwit, or Brainy Smurf. Explore unseen areas in the forest while battling against Stolas and the corruption that is plaguing the forest, and find other supporting favourites such as Papa Smurf and Poet Smurf.

Playing from a third-person view, the Smurfs are armed with a blaster to fire at enemies, and some fun ground-pound skills to hit many targets. It’s a lot of fun to run around while blasting crystals and bugs, and as you progress, each character can unlock a special skill. You can also find new ammo types to feed into the blaster, like honey to make enemies sticky and lock them in place. This was also handy for exploring when coming across things that move, like water wheels, so you could cover them with honey, stop them, and get past them.

There are a lot of platforming and extra paths to explore and some of these lead to secrets, so be sure to keep an eye out for secrets hidden in the forest. I was playing on the normal difficulty setting and found the platforming, at times, was the only hard thing, but this was due to timing on my end.

There is a very generous checkpoint system, and I am glad it was there because I ran into a few issues with the game crashing, or a key enemy not spawning, which completely halted progression.

The controls are very easy to pick up and learn, but it is ideally targeted for younger players. The skill tree was well laid out and easy to follow, with no branching sections or confusing paths that make you stop and double-check before spending your points. They kept it nice and simple with damage increases, speed of shots, and health upgrades, and it was nice to have an easy skill tree compared to recent games.

The Smurfs 2: The Prisoner of the Green Stone offers some great sights to behold, even though the forest was filled with threats trying to beat me. The environment was refreshing to look at and the lighting was done really well, especially in the second area of the story.

It was filled with bioluminescent flowers and it really added to the feeling of being deep within the forest that The Smurfs call home. Character models are really well done and look amazing, but it is severely let down by the overuse of the basic enemy mobs, like the spiders and bees – aside from being slightly bigger than others, they were always the same colour and designs.

The audio had equally good and bad sections for me. The voice acting was good, and it was nice having a full range of voiced characters. There was also some radio chatter as you played, helping to fill the void and lore as you progressed or hit a milestone in a mission. This was let down by the random audio dropouts that occasionally happened, and the very repetitive voice lines during combat – the first time I came across a major boss, Storm said the same line, over and over again. It didn’t take long before it got incredibly annoying.

The Smurfs 2: The Prisoner of the Green Stone is a fun action game for children. Or adults who want to “Smurf the world.” I felt I had to do a Smurf joke somewhere. It offers some amazing visuals and great locations to explore, as well as a fun and easy-to-play system, but it’s let down by repetitive enemies and glitchy and repetitive audio.

Written by: Shane Walsh