4cr review – Spiderwick Chronicles (Wii)

Reviewing a children’s game can be a pretty tough prospect. The standards you apply to every other game don’t always work here. Well, that’s not entirely true. You can’t just foist crappy games on kids because they are kids. That’s just wrong. To be more accurate, the set standards for critiquing a title apply a tad bit differently. Things like difficulty and story need different judging criteria. To a certain extent, this same line of reasoning applies to licensed games. It’s hard to just attach a flat number score to these games. Fans of the license will obviously get more out of it than someone who has never seen or read the source material.

This article isn’t really an editorial on the review process, so I’ll spare you my rantings (for now). The point is that Spiderwick Chronicles is unmistakably both a licensed property and a children’s game. When I started playing, I wasn’t quite sure how to approach my review. Turns out that I shouldn’t have worried, Spiderwick Chronicles is actually a pretty decent game by any set of standards.

That’s right, Spiderwick Chronicles is a pretty good game. It does help that I entered this with absolutely no preconceptions. I have never read the books. I didn’t even know that they existed or that a movie was coming out based on the series until the game showed up at my apartment. The story, which seems to have been taking directly from the post-”Harry Potter” generic fantasy framework, revolves around three siblings. The kids have moved, for some unexplained reason, into the creepy countryside estate of relative Arthur Spiderwick. Arthur was a bit kooky, you see. He was some sort of mad scientist who believed in monsters and fairies. He even wrote a book on the subject. The plucky kids find his book in a hidden study and soon find themselves plunged into a dark new world. Yeah, sure, it’s nothing original. Spiderwick isn’t trying to break new fantasy ground. Even the main characters have been taken from the Guide to Cliché Stereotypes. You get to control the angry young leader, the genius younger brother, and the older sister who really doesn’t want to be dragged into her brothers’ irritating games.

Alright, so the storyline isn’t really the reason to give this game a chance (unless, of course, you’re one of the presumably millions of kids who are into the books). The real reason is that the gameplay is actually pretty solid. Like most movie tie-ins, Spiderwick is a fairly straight-forward 3D action game. You’ll spend a lot of time whacking goblins with whatever weapons you have at hand. The motion controls are fairly well implemented. You swing your Wii Remote to attack and flick the nunchuck to dodge. Killing enemies nets you experience, which will unlock new attacks and combos. The motion controls do work pretty well, but I was still happy to see that Stormfront also allowed for button-only controls. The player gets the option of which control method to use (the classic controller is also supported).

One major complaint that I have is the god-awful camera. Giving the player the ability to control the camera is not an excuse for having a crappy camera in the first place. Nintendo, guys, please just give out the camera code from Mario Galaxy. We know that it’s possible to have a good camera in a 3D game. We shouldn’t have to settle for camera AI from the mid-90s. I found myself constantly stopping to adjust the camera. It’s hard to imagine that anybody, much less a kid, will be happy when the camera decides to focus on a wall instead of the deadly ogre that they are fighting. My other issue – the length. Even inexperienced gamers will be able to finish this in less than ten hours.

The graphics and art direction were a pleasant surprise. Sure, it’s an obvious parallel, but those of you who played EA’s Order of the Phoenix adaptation will feel a certain sense of deja vu here (Spiderwick thankfully has a better framerate). The settings in this game are bright, lush, and colorful. The forests in particular look fantastic. The character models don’t look quite as nice as the locations, but they are passable. This is also probably a good time to mention that Spiderwick Chronicles has one of the coolest loading screens ever. I’m not sure why, but for some reason, I would just stare at the wind-swept leaves flying by. The music, however, was pretty unremarkable. I can’t remember a single tune from the game. The voice acting was average at best, though that may be because kids are generally just not good actors.

For a licensed children’s property, Spiderwick Chronicles is actually a pretty decent game. For 90% of gamers out there, this probably won’t be an enticement to buy the game. I’m not even arguing that it should be. However, if you are a fan of the books or have kids, you could do far worse. If you’re desperate for a game set in a modern fantasy setting, give Spiderwick a rental. You might be as surprised as I was.

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