Reviewed: March 4, 2008
Reviewed by: Jeff Gedgaud
Publisher
Sierra Entertainment
Developer
Stormfront Studios
Released: February 5, 2008
Genre: Adventure
Players: 1
5
6
5
5
5.3
Supported Features:
Screenshots (Click Image for Gallery)
The Spiderwick Chronicles is the movie based game on the Wii console in all its puzzle adventure brought to the little screen. With the release of the feature film in studios we are again plagued by another rushed game based on the movie by Sierra Entertainment and Stormfront Studios.
Don’t get me wrong but I like many of the movies that get made into games but there is an inherent problem when making a game based on new release feature films. If the game has to launch the same time as the movie there is the simple problem of a deadline that coincides with the movie and you get all the problems of rushing the game. More often than not a game based on a new feature film will be average or below but on occasion the game will be good, not here though.
The Spiderwick Chronicles is supposed to be a good movie, but I have not seen it so cannot compare the game to the film and how well it followed the storyline. I can tell you that I did follow the story and it is a pretty good one but if it were not they would not be making a movie out of it. Herein lies the major problem of a game based on a movie, the story is already there so at least a major portion of the game development has been done as far as coming up with a viable story. The rest is blown on rushing the game out the door or more properly onto store shelves to coincide with the movie hitting the big screen.
The Spiderwick Chronicles for the Wii is about a family who moves to their uncle’s home in the country after a bitter divorce. The feelings of the family are not really explored other than the opening intro to the story and all you get from the game is the adventure part. The story is basically a reason to go flitting about the area around the house and the house itself getting objects to accomplish the current mission.
The whole game involves this object collection and running from one spot to the other to get these objects. While adventuring around the area you can see what objects are available by the glowing signs above them that highlight any interactive object. This makes the game of fetch that is The Spiderwick Chronicles a bit of a joke because there are no puzzles or finding hidden objects, just moving about with them.
When you enter a room you can turn around and view all the objects in the room and by moving up to each object tell right off the bat that object is useable now or in the future. If you can take the object it will say use object when you click down on the touch pad of the Wii remote. If the object is used at a later mission time you will get the saying look at object and know that at some time in the near future you will be back to collect it in due time.
The game is a chore list of finding the right object for each mission and getting from that object to the place it is supposed to be used, and that about sums up the gameplay. Sure there is more to it like smacking the little creatures that are part of the unseen world of The Spiderwick Chronicles with a bat and even using a golf type swing but this fun bashing is over shadowed by the fetch played throughout the game.
TThere is one section that has you playing the role of Thimbletack scurrying in the walls of the house skewering cockroaches as you accomplish some missions. The rest of the time you play as the human characters in the story to first explore the house and its environs as well as accomplish the major plots of the story.
Finding the objects you need to see the world in the field guide that Arthur Spiderwick found in his backyard is the major goal of the first part of the story. You continue to run around doing the same fetch games but using the different characters and accomplishing some fairly easy puzzles or doing a few quick boss fights.
The game continues with this monotonous fetch game through all the levels that get really very boring. Most of the gameplay movement is done for you like the jumping and getting to different areas like when you’re Thimbletack. When you’re the little rhyming brownie you have to move about to different levels and scurry up wires and along small pipes that is mostly done for you with some timing related moves here and there.
The house and grounds are done very well but the thing that stuck out to me the most was not the gaming but the load screens and how dark the game was. I played the game on the Wii and the Xbox 360 and the game starts off with a screen adjustment for brightness that gets cranked up so you can see what is happening.
The load screens are this neat leaves blowing around the screens instead of some silly bar that shows a wrong representation of how much you have to wait for the game till you play it. I know this is not much of an explanation about the games graphics but it is something that stuck out more to me than the graphics, says a bit about the gameplay.
The graphics are pretty good but not anything to brag about and certainly stuff you have already seen on the Wii console. The scenes are well done with plenty of detail and good textures but the scenes are blown with the glowing signs showing were all the items are.
The game has a few problems with the camera but at least you can move the camera independently from the character. You can hold the C button and move the camera around but it often got stuck and would not turn well using the Nunchuk to turn it.
The graphics in general were pretty good with some nice 3D scenery and the house and its textures really did look good. The rest of the game did well enough but nothing really stuck out as great or even much above average.
The voice acting was done in that general way that is often done in movie to game based voice acting of using several general sayings the actors are made to do for the game. They use these saying too much and there is a robotic like feel about the game from the quick and useless sayings that recur time and time again. There are a few scripted discussions but they don’t last for more than a few sentences and the cutscenes are just clips taken from the movie.
The sound and special effects are pretty decent but again like the graphics they are just about average. One of the low points in the voice and sound area is the same repetitive saying when checking out an object and getting the same answer every time. This ends up being a very repetitive game in many areas and shows just how well the game was rushed to meet its deadline.
If a company would release the game later they could really make a bundle by getting people to view the movie again or even waiting till the DVD release and really capitalize on a bundle sale of the game and movie in the same package. Value here is lost to the winds as I could not think of a reason to repeat the game for the life of me.
The Spiderwick Chronicles just does not hold any redeeming value and playing the game again would not be worth it. I really did not find much in the way of puzzles and they were really few and far between and the game really does boil down to a fetch for objects.
While The Spiderwick Chronicles will probably get a lot of people who read the books to buy the game I really don’t think the game is worth it. The reviews kind of speak to the quality of the game with an average of 65% and the scores up and down all over the place from 50% up to 85%.
The Spiderwick Chronicles is a game that closely follows the story from the feature film and is about average. Buy it if you like but there are no real surprises or great gameplay features that will be worth taking a second trip to the backyard of Arthur Spiderwick.