Monday 30 Jul 2007

‘Another Licensed game’ comes to mind straight away… and so it should, as it goes down the same road any other licensed game has gone before it (excluding perhaps Batman on the NES and Spiderman 2 on the PS2, GameCube and Xbox). Yup ladies and gentleman, once again I have had the honour of praying the game would come to an end.

This game follows the latest saga in the Pirates of the Caribbean movie and although the storyline of the movie was great, the actual story in the game is, to be quite honest, rather bland. Broadly speaking the game is a reckless ‘hack and slash,’ meaning that it is repetitively and ultimately dull. There are only so many times in our life that we want to fight respawning enemies! Guess they had to find a way to use those pixels. At World’s End is about as surprising as a Monday morning.

Swashbuckling game modes

So what does the game provide us with? The following - Story Mode, Challenge Mode and Dueling. In Story Mode you play through the adventure (only problem is that I am not too sure if it defines adventure) At World’s End where you have to find a person, find a key or free prisoners and fight your way to defeating all those challenging you out at sea; Challenge Mode provides a challenge to you and a friend to be the first to defeat 40 enemies or the first to collect 300 loot from the defeated enemies; Dueling offers you the chance to commence in a duel with one of your friends in a one-on-one battle.

It’s just so boring. Sure, several aspects are delivered through the use of the Wii Remote - swing your arm left and right or up and down for the sword to be swung in the direction you are intending or thrust it towards your telly to complete a combo. The idea is there but the developers most certainly did not achieve what they were intending to achieve. The game also follows a very simple path: setting on boat - setting on harbour, setting on boat - setting on harbour and at the end it’s all on boats. This game is as linear as it gets. Not that linear is a bad thing, Resident Evil 4 proves that, but we all have our limits. I find it difficult to believe that a child of five would actually have any fun with this in any way. Gah!

Are there any positives? Well actually yes, and it is where you would least expect it. The voice talents in this game are amazing, so good that I was led to believe that it was actually Johnny Depp’s or Keira Knightley’s beautiful voices blaring through my sound system with their quirky one-liners. However, reading the credits at the end informed me otherwise… these were ‘make believe’ voices! Well-done guys, you actually outdid yourself in something. The soundtrack is straight out of the movie, as expected.

Nothing surprising here mate

Graphically the game is nothing to write home about. If you have played any Disney game before this then you should have a rough idea of what this is all entails. Not even the character models have been given a facelift, nor has the particle effects, like the smoke from a cannon blasting off, been improved upon. This could have been done on the GameCube (even the N64 for that matter).

Brainless effortless ‘Hack and Slash’ I’m afraid… Savvy!

Pros: ‘Out of this world’ voice talent.
Cons: Repetitive game play mechanics; graphics conceivable on the N64; another bad movie license game.

Rating:
Contributor:	Dawid

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