"Arrgh! This does not work!"

The three Wallace and Gromit mini-movies were all successful and quite popular, and I myself was a fan of them. However, no matter how much I like the Wallace and Gromit characters, this game simply does not work properly to satisfy fans of the series or those who have never heard of Wallace and Gromit.

First, the controls feel broken. The camera swerves awkwardly, and your character, Gromit, often turns invisible or has to make blind jumps. In a game that largely revolves around platforming up huge towers of one sort or another, these "leaps of faith" are too common and far too fatal when the camera causes Gromit to plummet down to the bottom. Not that the camera is the only problem; many of the controls feel non-responsive, and it sometimes takes several presses to register - and yes, my Gamecube controller works fine for other games. The button combinations are difficult to remember, easy to confuse, and far more complicated than they need to be. Combine this with inconsistent responses for each individual button, and it becomes an impossible chore to remember and perform intended actions with any consistency at all.

There is also too much poorly-implemented collecting. Progressing through the levels requires collecting large numbers of nuts and bolts. Getting through some areas also requires the acquisition of a certain number of tools. However, it does not matter which of the ten tools you collect, so apparently a hammer is equivalent to a screwdriver for whatever bizarre work Wallace needs to do.

There are also large numbers of gold coins hidden which players, if they care to, can scoure the worlds to find. While this exploration is fun for a while, there are thirty hidden coins between each checkpoint, and so it is very annoying to be missing one coin and needing to redo a large portion of the game to find it. The coins unlock clips from Wallace and Gromit films and production interviews, and other such things - a nice reward, but not worth the effort for even the strongest of Wallace and Gromit fans.

To give the game some credit, the storyline isn't too bad - but it isn't great either. Picking up after The Wrong Trousers, it describes how the kleptomaniac penguin (who the game terms "Feathers McGraw", although the film never calls him any name) escapes from his cage at the zoo and takes over the entire place, putting the other animals to work getting diamonds for him. By kidnapping their babies, Feathers makes sure that the animals continue to work, or lose their children. Arriving to deliver a fish to a polar bear named Archie (who Feathers, for unexplained reasons, drags with him at all times), Wallace and Gromit must free the baby animals and stop Feather's evil plans.

The game does have some good points. The graphics and sound both seem realistic and fit the environments, and the platforming, if one ignores the horrible controls, is very good. However, the poor parts of the game drag everything else down too much for me to recommend this. I don't care how great your puzzles are; if I need to press the A button five times before it lets me make a single jump to an area I can't see, I am not having much fun.

Reviewer's Score: 3/10, Originally Posted: 01/02/07