Reviewed: November 18, 2005
Reviewed by: Arend Hart

Publisher
Ubisoft

Developer
Ubisoft

Released: November 1, 2005
Genre: Action
Players: 1
ESRB: Everyone

7
6
6
5
6.5

Supported Features:

But every now and then, a game like Trollz: Hair Affair comes across the GameChronicles desk, and nobody…and I mean NOBODY says a word – heck, nobody even wants to make eye contact with the game, for the fear that even something as trivial as that might be construed by the editors as a sign of interest and might result in an unwanted assignment.

So in walks hapless Arend, bragging about the new Nintendo DS and the Nintendogs game he just bought for his five-year-old daughter, Mieke. “Hmmm…” thought the editor, “four year old daughter, a Nintendo DS that plays Gameboy Advance games, and a game called Trollz: Hair Affair...we have a match!”

And that’s were everything went wrong…

This time around, the trolls – or Trollz – are much more attractive than in the wrinkled-up, pugly little pencil-caps and knickknack figurines of past years, but they still have the trademark massive hairdos – and apparently keeping that trademark hair looking cool is their main concern.

I won’t go to great lengths to describe the completely inane storyline which finds the girlz – I mean Trollz – all having some reoccurring dream about something weird happening, and then some boy gets in trouble at school and its not his fault, and the Trollz come to his rescue or whatever. Just let me say that if you are reading this review, you are either: 1) a young female Trollz fan who will totally understand the confusing storyline and all of its “hip” slang and cyberspeak won’t want me muddling it all up, or 2) everybody else who will simply button-mash your way through the colossal amount of dialog boxes simply to get at the gameplay.

And that’s how everything went wrong. Because, as embarrassing as it is for me to admit, I kind of like the gameplay in Trollz: Hair Affair. Not so much for what it is, but more for what it emulates.

Trollz is made up of five minigames, period. Each minigame corresponds to a certain Trollz character, and each is played over and over at increasing levels of difficulty. How these minigames work into the story is beyond me, but they are all fairly enjoyable – mostly because they are blatant rip-offs of popular games.

Each of the games is themed accordingly and each allows he girls to employ their own gem spell powers (which are picked up during play) to aid them in the process. The games are as follows:

Amethyst’s Flying Spell
This is a standard side strolling hover-scooter minigame that finds Amethyst trying to get from point to point collecting all of the scattered jewels, all without running into oncoming objects. Amethyst’s scooter is equipped with a weapon, which allows her to shoot the enemy “things” in her path. Probably the closest comparison to Flying Spell would be the old arcade classics Defender or Super Cobra, and while I only slightly liked this one, my daughter really had fun with the easy controls and forgiving gameplay.

Ruby’s Trollz Dance
By the name, it’s quite obvious that this is a direct rip-off of Dance Dance Revolution or any of the other beat-based dancing games. The gamer must match arrow and button presses to the beat of the music. Trollz Dance is a blast to play for adults, and the three-button setup did a much better job of easing my daughter into the dance genre easier than any DDR dance pad has been able to do so far.

Sapphire’s Smarty Trollz
Smarty Trollz is your basic “Concentration”-styled card-matching game, but with a twist; the game is timed, and every so often, a portion of the remaining cards gets reshuffled. What this means is that you have to keep a pretty good pace of flipping and matching, and really affix your eyes on the cards as they reshuffle so you can get a good idea of where certain cards moved. This was my daughter’s favorite minigame, and although she already plays a ton of these matching games on the PC, having it on a handheld in the car really had her smiling.

Topaz’s Watch the Hair.
Watch The Hair shrinks Topaz down to the size of a flea and lets her crawl around in one of the Trollz hair and remove all of the split ends, tangles and snarls all the while avoiding louse-like enemy creatures. I don’t know what this one would be most like, but it is probably the least likable of the bunch.

Onyx’s Spell Beads
A nicely done knockoff on the Bubble Bobble / Bust-A-Move style puzzle game, Spell Beads is the real treat of the bunch. And when I say that it’s a knockoff of the two mentioned games, I mean it – this game is virtually identical to those two. Is this a bad thing? Heck no. I found myself getting caught up in it’s simple color-matching gameplay, and coming back time after time to blast out a few rounds. This one was a bit over Mieke’s head, but hey – she’s only five.

Each of these mini-games allows the Trollz to pick up various game-specific spell powers that might, for example, cause the counter to ignore “misses” in Trollz Dance, enhance the aiming in Spell Beads, or “befriend” enemies in Flying Spell.

Trollz offers two different gameplay modes for gamers. Fans of the Trollz line will definitely be interested in trudging through the convoluted story of stolen powers and time travel and special amulets – but those with more discriminating tastes might want to forego the ridiculous storyline and go directly to the Boom Room.

The Boom Room allows gamers direct access to all of the mini-games, each with a handful of options to tweak difficulty and play preferences.

And that’s pretty much it for Trollz: Hair Affair – nothing more, nothing less. I half-expected to be coiffing hairdos, but thankfully that was not the case.

But Trollz gameplay was probably some of the least insulting that I have found in this whole kids show/video game crossover genre. I only wish there were more than five mini-games, and maybe a bit less story.