Ugh. I played Chicken Little this week.
For those of you who thankfully don't remember Disney's Chicken Little: Don't watch it. It's fucking bad. Moving on, let's talk about the video game for Xbox, PS2, and Gamecube.
Right, this schlock is a 3D platformer developed by Avalanche Software, most well known for their work on the Toy Story 3 and Disney's Infinity games. All 4 much better games than this one, highly recommend you fish a copy of Disney's Infinity and some figurines out of a GameStop dumpster if you get the chance, great for kids.
Anyway, we were talking about Chicken Little. This tire fire of a game follows the plot of the movie, including cutscenes straight from the film. although if you haven't seen the movie, don't worry, The game leaves out about...60% of the movie. Go pirate it if you REALLY need to know the story.
Right, let's talk about the gameplay for a minute, since we have to. It's super basic, for most stages you run around as Chicken Little, jumping and attacking with a short range or long range stun, or occasionally using very rare and very poorly programmed grapple hook spots to navigate compact platforming levels.
Until you're on the ship. Then you go in a straight line for more or less the rest of the game.
This is the meat of the game, and it's some of the blandest platforming I think I've ever forced myself through. The whole 6 hours I played this game to get to the end credits I was bored outa my skull, just wishing I was playing Yooka-Laylee, or Jersey Devil, 40 Winks, hell, ANY other 3D platformer.
When you're not doing that crap, you'll be playing one of the 3 other level types in this game, namely Hallway chaise scenes ala Crash Bandicoot, Actually really good 3D space combat levels, and Driving stages. Ugh, Driving stages. Those were my secound least favorite stages, you pinball all around a huge map on strict timers trying to avoid props and cars, bleh. It was not a good time.
Is this what hue-mans call fun?
By the end of the game the platforming stages start to drag out for a long time, and you're faced with endless hallways, fighting the same 2 enemy types over and over while you go in more or less a straight line to your goal, it was so tedious. Shoot the button, lump on the platforms, rinse, repeat, drink heavily.
I only have 2 good things to say about this piece of filth, and that's A: They got the voice cast for the 3 main characters back for the game; and B: That the flying levels were ok. They weren't great, but they were FAR more stimulating than the rest of the game.
Join me next week when I cover Disney's Cars, a game that I know for a fact is much better.