A decent licensed game? Could it be? It was bound to happen, based on the whole “so many monkeys with so many typewriters” theory; inevitably, through the law of averages, something of value would eventually have to be created by randomly mashing buttons on a keyboard, cramming it into a box, and pronouncing it “game.”
Eventually. Inevitably. But not today.
I’m torn on the whole movie tie-in review process. Clearly these kinds of games are developed solely to cash in on an established franchise, and as a result lack a particular degree of polish that one might find in, say, a box of stale donuts or a tuna sandwich. Very rarely are the developers of a media tie-in given sufficient time for fine-tuning or sometimes even coarse-turning, as the game must be released concurrently with the movie if the publisher wishes to wrest every sweaty, lingering centavo from the fists of gamers whose instincts and self-preserving judgment are somewhat less developed than those of the average Interstate armadillo. Hence the quality of ninety-nine percent of all media-based games. Yes, Godfather, you too. Don’t take it personal. It’s just business.
Perhaps best known for milking the LEGO pecuniary bovine into bleating dessication while simultaneously churning out dross like Transformers: The Game and Finding Nemo, UK-based developer Traveller’s Tales is no stranger to the media tie-in. Judging from the lone title on their backlist which was not based on someone else’s intellectual property, Haven: Call of the King, that’s probably a good thing.
The measure of a good media tie-in is simple; does it stand on its own as an entertaining experience without relying on the source to drive sales? Does it offer satisfying gameplay while remaining at least partially true to the original material? The answer to these questions is almost always an emphatic “not no but get the hell out of my yard no.” Prince Caspian fails to pluck the media tie-in chicken of shittiness, and while it manages to sidestep some of the most perilous pitfalls of the genre, it does so with several blood-curdling caveats.
I’ve said it before; God of War, you go sit in the corner with the N-Gage and Xbox Live think about what you’ve done, you naughty little bastard, you. While the N-Gage’s transgressions were harmless and largely irrelevant, God of War and Xbox Live have much to answer for in the way that they’ve irreparably fucked up single-player gaming for the forty-seven of us left on the planet who still care about such antiquated concepts as doing shit by ourelves.
With God of War, I’m talking about the infuriatingly tedious mechanic of mashing a single button thirty times just to open a door, or pull a lever, or kill a bad guy. It’s as though some lackwit came to the caput inter culus decision that if pressing the X button once in order to open a chest was fun, then pressing it thirty or forty times in spastic succession would surely be an orgy of Caligulaic proportions. Whoever invented this unfortunately trendy convention should be rolled up in a foul-smelling carpet and hit with a hammer. Whoever uses it in their games should have to scrub the carpet afterward with their toothbrush.
Caspian is as guilty of employing this mechanism as any game I’ve yet played. Mashing the X button to accomplish every single task grew tiresome after the first three missions, so by the time I was halfway through I was ready to pursue more stimulating interests, such as removing ear wax with a straightened paper clip and bouncing various items off my forehead into the trash. Helpful aside; D batteries hurt like a bastard, but sardines are disturbingly fun.
You killed my second cousin. On my mother’s side. Prepare to suffer mild discomfort.
Where Prince Caspian manages to offer glimmers of luster through its many layers of tarnish is in its fluid combat animations and the variety of playable characters. Graphically the PS3 version is serviceable enough to remind me that I paid $50 for the experience instead of the PS2’s $30 admission fee, but that’s where the accolades end; the repetitively simplistic gameplay grabs whatever virtues Caspian might possess and beats them down like productive discourse at the Libertarian National Convention. The puzzles, which consist of moving item A to designated area B, then pulling switch C, repeat ad nauseam, are unoriginal and grate on seasoned gamers’ sensibilities, though they won’t keep acolytes interested long enough to win converts to the pastime. Neither will the timed missions or the escort missions or the lack of a movable camera, which frequently not only gets in the way of the action, but sets up a tailgate party in front of it and invites over some burly friends to obscure our view with images of ill-fitting sweatpants and their attendant unmentionables.
LEGO Star Wars’ influence on Prince Caspian is brain-thumpingly obvious, right down to the silver, gold, and blue collectible shards (shards of what, exactly, is never made clear) that boost the characters’ cumulative health level. In LEGO Star Wars, collectible studs are used as in-game currency to purchase unlockable characters, but the concept remains the same; collect, reward, move on.
Unfortunately, that’s where the favorable comparison fails to pull out in time and becomes a grease spot on the dusty, jagged walls of Beggar’s Canyon. While LEGO Star Wars and the upcoming LEGO Indiana Jones possess both the charm of the LEGO medium and the unlimited power of the well-established franchise, Narnia must stand on its own as a game, and this it simply cannot do. Where it fails most miserably is in its lack of focus; neither a true puzzle game, nor a true hack and slash, the scattershot, please-everyone, offend-no one design approach is reminiscent of the very worst elements of the most horrible tie-ins ever produced. Most of the time, however, the game is simply substandard meh.
At best The Chronicles of Narnia: Prince Caspian is a one-day rental for a couple of mildly entertaining hours. For the six of you to whom the Narnia books and films represent the pinnacle of escapist childhood storytelling (proselytizing notwithstanding), wait for a price drop; at its current cost it’s an egregious attempt at legitimized theft.
