Licensed games are not necessarily a bad thing: every once in a while, you can definitely find a game of high quality based on a license that is timeless. Such a thing can remind you of why you love a license or franchise in the first time, enthralling you in a whole new way and making you remember what you loved about the license to begin with. Sometimes the license is so timeless that your love is born anew, as pure and unfettered as the first time you saw it. There is a magic caused by the meeting of those two components.
The Animaniacs is not one of those licenses, and Animaniacs: Lights, Camera, Action! is not one of those games.
Okay, so let's get this out of the way: the Animaniacs isn't a great license to make a game about. However, with that in mind, it's perfectly reasonable to think that a good game could be made from it. I mean, the series had comedic elements that could make for an entertaining game, and with the right balance of wacky, fast-paced action and quippy humor this could really work, so long as they stay true to the source material.
None of that happened. Animaniacs: Lights, Camera, Action! is not a good game. It cannot be misconstrued as such. Ever. Everything about it can be described as mediocre at best. In the spirit of fairness, I am going to break down why this is so.
To start off with, the graphics of the game are more reminiscent of a GBA or SNES game than they are something out of the Nintendo DS: some of the environments are imaginative, and characters generally look like they're supposed to, but this doesn't exactly push the abilities of the system or do anything new in any way whatsoever. The enemy designs are pathetic, most not even reminiscent of the show, and in general it's almost impossible to be impressed with anything about the way it looks. It's passable, but only just so.
The sound is no more impressive, if not less so. I mean, sure, I don't expect full voice acting from the game or anything of the sort, but some really cartoony boings or booms or KABLAMS or SPLOITS should have been included. What voice samples they did use, like when the characters jump, don't sound anything like the actors who portray them in the cartoon. This is not a good thing. The music is so nondescript I can't actually remember any of it, though in reality that's something that's to be expected from a game like this. This isn't supposed to be an aural feast, and so long as you keep them in mind you won't be too disappointed.
While I'm thinking about it, let's talk about the characters. There are five you can play as - Yakko, Wakko, Dot, Pinky, and the Brain. Out of these, only the Brain and arguably Wakko retain any of the charm that they had in the cartoon, which is a shame because the other characters get just as much screen time. Each character has specific abilities and weaknesses - the Brain can work levers that the others can't but is unable to jump, Dot can jump really far but can't push objects, etc. It's basically what you would expect; only they are not presented as being cartoony or particularly fun to watch or play as.
The premise for the game, in the context of the show, doesn't make a lot of sense either. The owner of the lot where the Warner Children (the aforementioned Yakko, Wakko, and Dot) live is forcing them into making movies, or else he'll throw them out onto the street/lock them in their water tower for the rest of time. Hello? Maybe this is the seven-year-old in me talking, but the Animaniacs were all about getting outside of the studio, and keeping them locked in there was the most impossible thing in the history of the world, especially when it came to the water tower. That threat doesn't click. But hey - it's just a videogame based on a decade-old cartoon, right? Premise shouldn't matter so long as we can get our game on! But that doesn't happen.
Now, the gameplay. Here's one aspect that I need to get out of the way: this is barely a Nintendo DS game at all. I haven't played the Game Boy Advance version, but I imagine that it is borderline identical [I've got a review of the GBA version coming soon and it is. - Jared]: you don't use the touch screen for anything. You can use it to pause the game, if you prefer not to press the Start button, and you can look there to see how much food you've collected, but really, that's it. Nothing else. No alternate methods of control, no camera manipulation…no nothing. There is nothing about this game that justifies it being on the DS at all, which is something I can't help frowning upon.
As for the game itself...well, to start off with, the camera angle (which can't be adjusted) and the controls are isometric. Press left makes your character go up/left, up is up/right, right is down/right, and down is down/left. I hate controls like that. The target audience for this game would go insane trying to work the controls, especially in situation where you have to precisely aim projectiles at enemies who don't move according to those rules (like the dogs in the first level). You can adjust the controls so that the direction you press is the direction you move, but all of the game's platforming is set up for the isometric controls and they're so touchy that it's very hard to pull off if you don't conform to that. So you have to choose between frustrating combat and rage-inducing if simplistic platforming. Peachy.
The puzzles in the game are logical albeit simplistic, and the limitation of the different characters means that you will switch between them on the fly. This isn't so bad, since it's easy and the process by which you do it expands the time limit that you have for each stage. The puzzles actually mostly involve just running around and either throwing apples at things or flipping switches as the Brain before jumping around as other characters, but the target audience for this game (either people old enough to fondly remember the show's beginnings or kids young enough not to care) will not find them entertaining: it will come across as either mundane or pointlessly roundabout and frustrating. For me it was the former, but when I was young I would have HATED this kind of stuff. I mean, Wakko always was really good at hitting things with a hammer the size of a bus. Lemme do that.
The aforementioned time limit can be extended by either playing the mini-game that switches character or by collecting film canisters - the idea is that you have to finish a scene or level before you run out of film, an interesting if contrived idea. Your character can't die or even get knocked out - they just mess up the scene, get a roll of film taken away, and start back at the last checkpoint. This makes the game unapologetically easy to crawl through if only because you can go search out a character switch point and literally build up dozens of canisters in a matter of minutes, enough to get you through any level.
The saving system for a game isn't something I usually mention because in most games nowadays it's pretty uniform: you get to a save point or beat a level and you save your progress so you can continue your game later. This has become a feature so common in games today that younger players may not even realize that, many years ago, gamers were forced to remember passwords, essentially number or letter sequences that told the game where you were and how much progress you had made up to that point. That system of saving is dead. So why, oh why is it being used here? Is it going too far to say that a game this simplistic, with so little to keep track of, has no excuse for using a password system? That using a password is, in fact, inexcusable? I submit that it is not. I don't know much about making games but I can't attribute that kind of thing to anything but laziness, pure and simple. Seriously. A password system? I know that the show started up in 1993 but the password system was effectively dead even then. It's not cute. It's not entertaining. It's annoying.
Bottom Line:
There's so much wrong with the game I don't know where to start. It looks like a GBA game, sounds like a bad GBA game, plays like a GBA game, is short, possesses little or none of the charm of the show it's based on, which by the way shouldn't be getting a videogame over a decade after it was actually popular, has isometric controls which I hate, and in general just is not fun at all. And did I mention the password saving system? Don't pick this up. Don't even think about buying it unless you're some kind of lunatic who buys everything that has to do with the Animaniacs. I'm not usually that fervent about not picking up games, but there are too many alternative games for the DS that you could be picking up instead, ones that actually make use of the system, to make this a viable addition to anybody's library. It's not terrible, but man, it's pretty bad.
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3.8 |
Posted: 2005-11-03 20:17:02PST