Rating: 2.0 (yeah...it's that bad..)
Well, being another one of thousands of games made solely after a movie...my expectations were low for this game...and guess what? I was right! What a surprise!!
Garfield gets Real is a prime example of a licensed title that barely manages to make any remarkable use of the license involved, and it's certainly not something I'd suggest anyone pick up and play, regardless of age or casual/hardcore sensibilities.
The game revolves around the recently released DVD featuring a CGI Garfield, and while it's been quite a while since I've been a fan of the long-running newspaper comic, the character does hit an old nostalgic nerve in me, so I'm instantly hopeful to see something good come out of this. Ten minutes into the title, that hope was permanently dashed, and I realize that I'm stuck playing a series of mini-games meant to mimic a movie being filmed. The mini-games star Garfield in a series of bizarre and non-related events that I can't imagine have much of a connection to the story that the actual film might represent. (If it does, I certainly don't plan on watching the movie in the near future.)
Anyways, back to the game.
The stages are set in seven different areas, starting out in Garfield's house and featuring the usual cast, notably Jon and Odie. A lot of the action is controlled via the touch-screen, but there are optional face buttons for just about every movement in the game, and each stage is a mixture of different play types, which contribute to the gameplay's overall mini-game feel. One stage has you gathering breakfast items that Jon tosses behind him toward Garfield, and you must move Garfield back and forth in the foreground to catch them. It's a pretty simple game of catch, and aside from the occasional plate that you'll want to miss, it's definitely easy. Along with that, it's really boring and ends up setting the tone for the rest of the game, regardless of how differently each stage plays out.
When using the stylus, you can swipe it against the touch-screen on the DS toward the right, which will get Garfield walking. To get him to stop, you need to swipe down, or swipe up to jump. Right away, this method isn't particularly precise, and I found it not registering certain movements all the time, so I opted to go with the d-pad instead. While this was definitely more precise, the idea of need to press down to halt Garfield's movement feels unintuitive to say the least, and I've never played a 2-D side-scrolling anything that needed me to hit a virtual brake to make my player stand still. Why not just stop when I stop holding down left or right, like most games? Issues with the controls crop up often in other events, mostly stemming from the unresponsive touch-screen. If you ever insist on playing this game for whatever reason, do yourself a favor and automatically default to the d-pad and face buttons; you'll save a little bit of that aggravation for the other design problems that you'll encounter.
Visually, the game is unattractive, and while the character models are easily identifiable, the textures are a mess, and everything is blocky and ill-defined. The sound is grating, with a small selection of voices and some awful soundtrack music that will have you turning off the DS sound in a matter of minutes.
So, what have we learned here?
Garfield gets Real isn't a good game and is one of the worst licensed titles I've played this year so DS owners, Garfield fans and gamers in general will do well to avoid this one. There's nothing remarkable or enjoyable about the gameplay, so you should avoid this one at all costs and not give into the budget price.* In short, the game is blegh!
*pics/info from worthplaying.com as well
No comments:
Post a Comment