Garfield - The Search For Pooky

"Disappointing Garfield adaptation, could have been more than a dull platforms game with just a little effort"

Think of Garfield: the laziest of all cats. He's extraordinarily selfish, cynic and fat, and we love him for it. But when you think about the cat that gathers all those characteristic, what kind of game do you think he should have? Bingo! Garfield: the Search for Pooky is, as you undoubtedly guessed, a platform game for children where you have to dash around the place skillfully dodging flying critters and leap from one platform to another in quick successions of jumps. I, personally, would have designed a Garfield game where you would have to devise plans to steal food with the minimum possible effort (the theme of the comics, we could say), but hey.

The problem of having an allegedly fast-paced platform game which features a comic character that has trouble taking a step away from his bed without displacing the Earth's axis is that it's going to end up being either terribly slow or untrue to the comics. The Search for Pooky has both flaws, but proves to favour the former one.

The graphics are a good example of that willingness to stay in character: even though the backgrounds are undetailed, repetitive, dull and quite frankly downright ugly most of the time, the sprites of the characters have been taken directly from the comic book. As a consequence, the animations are less varied and fluid than they would have been if the developers had built their own sprites from scratch, but nevertheless the experience of having your GBA display a Garfield that is the exact same you see in your comic book is worth the decrease in quality. The amazingly uninteresting backgrounds have no such excuse, though.

Unlike the graphics, the gameplay manages to both betray the ‘Garfield spirit' and be slow and uninteresting. Regardless of each level's objective (detailed at the very beginning), the point is always to make it from one side of the screen to the other in one piece. One level requires hunting mice and tossing them into a cage, whereas you need to have Odie dig holes in the garden in another one. It doesn't matter very much: the core of the game is still jumping across gaps and dodging or attacking various unfriendly animals.

In order to walk along the looped background image sufficiently or “beat a level”, you can walk, run, and attack. The ‘attack' button makes Garfield wave his paws wildly in all directions for as long as you keep the B button pressed. No problem. The real question is: to walk, or to run? While walking, I estimate Garfield keeps an average cruise speed of five kilometres per day. On the other hand, Garfield's jump is the equivalent of me leaping over my 6-storey apartment block. So you, mister player, can choose between being loyal to Garfield's persona and spending about six hours walking from one end of your GBA's screen to the other, or turning the cat into a leaping-frenzied furby and finishing the game before you start feeling your youth withering away.

In the end, and considering all the above factors, I imagine kids who like reading Garfield comics and are only just starting to play videogames will be the audience who will most appreciate The Search for Pooky. Anyone with just a little more gaming experience or a little more fondness on Garfield will undoubtedly notice the game's need for less platforms and more sassy comments, less running around and more masterminding mischief. In other words, the game could have been better if they'd tried.

Reviewer's Score: 4/10, Originally Posted: 01/11/06