"The most technically inept game I've ever seen!"

Wallace and Grommit in Project Zoo is, underneath it all, a very good platform adventure, that, due to it's being the most technically inept game ever made, will try your patience to the breaking point, and beyond. After 7 hours of game play I now have to start over for the third time, if I expect to get everything. I will devote a full section to this below, but for now let's start with the good stuff.

GRAPHICS: 6/10 Not the best in the world, it is that way deliberately, in keeping with the films themselves, and does look exactly like them. I had to deduct a point for the fact that for no reason at all the game will pause for several seconds and then jerk back to where it was.

MUSIC/SOUND: 6/10 The music is mostly forgettable, but the sound effects are okay. The game absolutely refuses to acknowledge that it is in Dolby pro logic 2, and is one of the worse sounding games on the Gamecube.

CAMERA/CONTROL: 3/10 It's not that the camera is so bad, though at times you do disappear, and at other times you have to jump blind, but rather, that the controls are horrible. When you hit the jump button, at least 50% of the time it does not work, nor does holding r and hitting jump for a high jump. The button combinations are needlessly complicated as you will be pushing the wrong ones constantly, and don't even get me started on the miserable non functionality of the spring boots, necessary for the first boss.

TECHNICAL FINESSE: 1/10 This is what I alluded to in my introduction. I did not know what else to call this section. Besides the stop/start I mentioned under graphics, and the horrible lack of control I mentioned above, there is the following. If you finish a level, there are only six, broken into sub levels, and want to replay it to find what you missed, you can only replay the boss, or redo the entire thing from the beginning. That means having to re-rescue the animal babies, and re-listening and watching all the FMVs and information screens, with absolutely no way to shut them off or fast forward through them. If you get to the end of a level, and know you missed some stuff, you have to be real careful not to inadvertently trip the mechanism to get to the boss, and have no way to return to where you were. To make matters worse, if you have, say, 25 tokens, and want to get the other five, so replay the level, you better make real sure you know where they all are, because if you only get some of them, and quit playing, the only way to get the rest is to start over from the beginning again. Now, this would be irritating enough,but you have to do all those FMV's again, etc. Then there is more good news, places where you can get trapped and not be able to go on without starting over. Case in point, in the second section of the first level, Wallace has to fix a bridge so he can go over it, but even fixing it he won't go over it until you rescue the baby. Not knowing this, somehow I managed to lower the bridge and get Wallace to walk in the water, from which there was no way to get him out and to continue the game.

GAMEPLAY: 7/10 This is typical platform stuff, but quite a bit to do. In each level there are 30 tokens and 10 tools to find, and the tokens can be very hard to both find and get. You also get nuts and bolts that Wallace uses to fix things. If the entire game were up to the level of the gameplay, it would be a real treat for platform fans, as it is though, it is a nightmare.

VALUE: 5/10 If you play through the whole thing for 100%, you unlock movies, a good thing, and without being forced to replay level after level you should spend 20-30 hours on it; however, after restarting the first level over and over just to be able to save it where you don't have to keep doing it, before getting the boss, you may throw your hands up and just give up. If you do actually manage to finish the game rate it 7/10 instead.

FINAL COMMENTS: I started out really liking this game, and then I came to the first bonus level, where I died constantly due to the jump button's lack of response, after that it was just one technical nightmare after another. I already paid my money and took my chance, I have to continue, but you don't. You should avoid this at all costs, why reward a company for rushing a game out that pretty much is only half finished, which may explain why after finishing the first, and supposedly smallest of 6 levels, I'm 26% done, or are the makers as inept at math as they are at game making?

Reviewer's Score: 3/10, Originally Posted: 10/23/03