Although this has been a great summer for anyone who bought a PSP to use as a mobile movie theater, it's been less fun for those who bought it to be a gaming machine. The few games that have been released since the PSP's launch have been mostly yawn-inducing ports or sequels to existing franchises, leaving gamers wondering if anything original was ever going to come their way. To the rescue comes the oh-so-cuddly grim reaper in training, Death Jr.

Borrowing a page from Tim Schaeffer's playbook, Death Jr. offers up standard action and platform elements in a charmingly weird and disturbing wrapper, much the way that Psychonauts did earlier this year. Death Jr. (DJ to his friends) and his cohorts are pretty much how I imagine the cast of The Nightmare Before Christmas was as schoolchildren: odd and creepy, but ultimately endearing. There's the main man himself; Stigmartha, whose hands bleed when she gets nervous; Seep, a kind of a thing in a bottle; Pandora, who has a way with opening things; conjoined twins Smith and Weston; and my personal favorite, the pimp among pimps, Dead Guppy. He's…well, he's a dead guppy. One day, during a school trip to the Museum of the Supernatural, our gang sneaks off from the main tour in order to go exploring, eventually finding a mysterious box that Pandora is shocked to discover she can't open. DJ, stud that he is, whips out his scythe and breaks the lock on the box, thus letting out a very nasty demon plant sort of thing that immobilizes his friends and takes over the museum. (Men, let this be a lesson to you: doing stupid things to impress women usually has dire consequences.) DJ figures that asking his dad for help will just get him in loads of trouble, and so sets out to rescue his friends on his own.

The evil demon thing stole DJ's friends' psyches, fractured them into three pieces, and hid them away in the different levels of the game, and DJ's mission is, surprise, to track down the pieces and reassemble them. The environments, though largely uninspired, reflect their owner's personalities; Stigmartha loves school, so her levels are filled with classrooms, lockers and books, while Dead Guppy's are set in a meat-themed amusement park. (Seriously, guys, what's with the meat? First Psychonauts had the meat circus, and now we have a meat amusement park? Makes you wonder about certain game designer's upbringings.) Each level is pretty straightforward, linear, and infested with a healthy assortment of fireball-tossing, headbutt-delivering demons. When DJ dispatches enemies, he harvests their souls (he is a grim reaper, after all), which are then used to unlock the Eye Doors found throughout the levels. Each door requires a certain number of souls to unlock it, and any extras DJ brings with him score him big bonuses.

Besides his trusty scythe, DJ has a surprisingly robust assortment of weaponry at his disposal. Smith and Weston (who ran away when the box was opened) provide our hero with all manner of guns and weapon upgrades, and although it struck me as sort of out of character for Death incarnate to be running around with a shotgun, it certainly did come in handy against stronger enemies, or those that were annoyingly out of reach. A flamethrower, chain gun, electric gun, and twin machine guns round out the arsenal, with C4 hamsters giving it that little something extra. That's right. I said C4 hamsters.

Despite having a truly charming cast of characters and a keen eye for amusing detail, Death Jr. leans far too heavily on conventional action/platforming formulae. There are the icons to collect in order to expand the health bar, there are the ammo boxes to break open, there's the wall jump, the hook swing, and the strafing. The enemies come at a fast enough clip that the game is never boring, but there's certainly nothing to make gamers say "Ooooo!" either. Although the look of the levels differ from each other, the basic blueprint remains the same: kill a bunch of enemies, bust up as much of the environment as possible (so to rack up that all-important end-of-level bonus), collect enough souls to open the Eye Door, move on to the next section, lather, rinse, repeat. The demons don't change from section to section either, so those spidery things from Seep's section? Yeah, they're all over Dead Guppy's area, too. The animation is silky smooth, and load times are insignificant, but considering how creative and fun the characters are, I was expecting more from the rest of the game. The sense of humor that created Stigmartha is nowhere to be found in her levels, and Seep's environments are positively dull. They're rendered well, and up to the task, but they'd be perfectly at home in any number of action titles out there; they just lack the sense of individuality that the kids have.

Although the visual design of Death Jr. is a bit of a let-down, it's still solid and serviceable, which is more than I can say for the controls, which had me close to hurling my PSP into the nearby river. Fortunately, we've been having a bit of a drought this summer, thus derailing my drama-queen angst move before I could get into a decent wind-up. The square button is used to whip DJ's scythe around, while the circle button uses his secondary weapon, such as the shotgun or flamethrower. The D-pad is used to cycle through the armory, and the analog stick moves DJ around. And around. And over there, and diagonal, and pretty much everywhere but where the player actually wants him to go. The control is so loose and sloppy that performing even the most simple platforming maneuvers can become maddeningly frustrating, like the oh-dear-god-when-will-developers-stop-putting-this-in-games wall jump. (Ubisoft, you get special dispensation for Prince of Persia, but everyone else, quit it already!) The wobbly analog control makes swinging from hook to hook far more obnoxious than it should be, although slipping into first person view to line things up does make it somewhat easier. The lock-on when using a gun works sporadically at best, often turning DJ around to aim at nothing, despite a small army of demons heading his way. It works very well for airborne enemies, but for everything else, it's quite literally hit and miss.

The only thing in Death Jr. more deadly than DJ himself is the unfriendly camera, which is clumsy, unfriendly, and guaranteed to get players killed on a regular basis. Whether it's not being able to judge a jump distance properly, or just not quite being able to get a bead on an enemy, players will suffer more than one cheap death as a result of not being able to see properly.

What's most frustrating about Death Jr. is that it positively reeks of potential. Some aspects of it are absolutely brilliant, while others are ho-hum at best, shoddy at worst. The characters are great, and the gameplay, though ordinary, is a solid combination of action elements and platforming. With just a little bit more work, the game could have truly been visionary and unique. As it is, it's a relatively plain title with some semi-broken controls, very funny dialogue and entertaining cutscenes. Still, given the PSP's lackluster library, especially in this genre, Death Jr. is a wise purchase for owners of Sony's handheld, even if it doesn't quite get everything right.