Reviewed: August 11, 2008
Reviewed by: Jeff Gedgaud
Publisher
THQ
Developer
Heavy Iron Studios
Released: June 24, 2008
Genre: 3D Platformer
Players: 1-2
6
5
5
6
6.5
Supported Features
WALL-E is a charming and somewhat fun platformer for the Nintendo DS that almost makes a good game but mostly gets a bit too repetitive. WALL-E is the cute robot that does his job faithfully and without reward in a future full of humanities trash.
The Nintendo DS game WALL-E does a fair job of entertaining as a puzzle adventure in a platformer package that takes you through the WALL-E movie story. WALL-E is a robot that cleans up, day in and day out he roams the junk yard and picks up stuff, smashes it into cubes and waits for the humans to return.
Problem is the humans have been on vacation a bit too long and WALL-E has been left to clean up their mess, with just a lonely cockroach for a pet and the last life form left on earth. Enter EVE, Extraterrestrial Vegetation Evaluator to find out if the planet has any plant life left, WALL-E of course falls in love and follows EVE like a smitten love sick puppy.
WALL-E has some easy controls and very intuitive moves; he can pick up, crunch up and throw things while EVE on the other hand flies and drops stuff. To start you have to move WALL-E through several puzzle type levels and you finish off with some flying as EVE. That about sums up the Nintendo DS version of WALL-E but the puzzles are very ingenious and fun, just a bit too many puzzles strung together. WALL-E is the biggest part of the platformer and the flying portions with EVE are a bit small and not interesting enough to add anything to the game overall. As WALL-E you move around the levels getting from point A to point B with conveyors, bridges and other obstacles you need to get past. You do this by throwing hunks of trash, explosives and magnetic material to get you through the puzzles.
The throwing of junk will trigger switches while the explosives help propel you across pits and the magnetic material pulls you or other metal objects toward it. Using these simple moves you need to traverse canyons, cross moving conveyors, sometimes moving the wrong way and get to the finish of each level.
The puzzles are fun and you often will take a few minutes to solve each new one but they often throw several repeats one after the other into areas making the game repetitive after awhile. You may find yourself just solving the same puzzles over and over to get through the areas due to hitting a laser or falling into one of the chasms.
Once you do figure out any individual puzzle it just becomes a repetition when you’re presented with the same one again. If you fall or get hit and start a level over it becomes a matter of repeating the level until you get back to your accidental drop off point.
In WALL-E on the Nintendo DS you have the touch screen with your map of the level and your actual 3 dimensional view on the top screen. This 3D view is pretty good but there are times when you cannot quite see how close WALL-E actually is to drop offs or objects so it can be a bit hit and miss when it comes to falling in or getting burned.
This introduces the most frustrating aspect of WALL-E and having to repeat portions because you fail and have to start over in the level. Other than this the view is pretty good and graphics look nice but there is nothing over the top that really stands out in any way for the game.
Textures and objects are all sort of the same with very little differences as the entire game plays out on a very much wasted world. The differences are mostly to help you differentiate from walls, floors and chasms and mean very little in the grand scheme of the game.
WALL-E and EVE themselves are basic sprite shapes that have some moving parts and are pretty simply designed with very little to them. The entire game is good but nothing more than just fair or average overall and everything works fine.
Sound was pretty simple with the usual simple audio that plays while you try to get WALL-E or EVE through the levels. They have the usual buzzing of WALL-E’s gears as he treads the pavement and the now familiar plaintive wail when you fall off an edge.
Other than the basics there was not much to the audio which is not surprising for the Nintendo DS but it all worked fine.
Running WALL-E through all the levels will take a few hours but going back or even trying to get all the tokens while playing through is not all that exciting. This is more of a puzzle game than anything without much replay value once you have figured things out.
The EVE levels give you a little additional playing value but only amount to flying her through some canyons and avoiding things as you drop cubes on stuff. The main excitement here is playing WALL-E and there just is too much going back and getting things right with the penalties of falling or getting shot that make it not all that fun to have to replay levels when you have to.
Actually picking up the game and starting over would just be more of the same and not all that fun so the value is limited to the first go around in my opinion. This is a good game to rent for a one shot play if you really want to see what the WALL-E game on the Nintendo DS is all about.
WALL-E on the Nintendo DS is a cute game starring that cute and almost human expressioned robot from the hit CGI movie that Pixar has recently released. The plot is the same from the movie but in a very simplified way and not all that great for the handheld system.
You can have some fun on this puzzle solving platformer but one time is plenty as you will undoubtedly be playing several sections of levels over due to a poor game design. The game is fine but it just punishes pretty harshly for mistakes by restating levels instead of dropping you in or some other game mechanic for a mistake.
WALL-E on the Nintendo DS would be a fine game to rent but you may want to think it over before purchasing, you would really have to love either WALL-E or repetitive puzzle solving to own it.