Wall-E (Nintendo DS) Review

Whilst the film is quite simply brilliant, somewhat inevitably, the game is a pile of trash. For some reason the developers have chosen to make this little DS title a puzzle game. Most...no wait, all of the puzzles, involve chucking blocks of rubbish at switches. This would be okay (boring, but okay) were it not for the infuriating camera that you have to move yourself. For some reason the the camera always seems to face the wrong way, meaning you'll miss switches that you need to press in order to progress. It just seems needlessly clumsy and a little bit tedious.

The film follows a wonderful little plot and really makes the life of this fairly unimportant seeming robot utterly captivating. In the game he just picks up trash and throws it at stuff. Whilst the narrative of the film is draped around the game in the form of stylishly animated cartoon cut-scenes, the actual gameplay itself is just a case of throwing blocks. Admittedly it does change locale, so you can throw blocks on Earth and later on in space, but that doesn't really add enough to keep your interest. Chuck in some exciting special bits of trash that explode and disable electronics and stuff and you have enough variety to keep a two year old amused for ten seconds.

Whilst the daft camera is fine in earlier levels, it is almost impossible to work with when enemies are introduced. Some of the puzzles are really clever and take quite a bit of head-scratching to work out, but this involves a lot of camera swivelling. This, surprisingly enough, takes time, something you don't have a whole lot of when you're being attacked by evil folk. As a consequence of this, you'll probably end up dying quite a bit. On each level you have five lives, die five times and you go right back to the start. That would be alright, but most the time you'll die from falling into a hole that the camera angle didn't show properly or getting hit by a laser that you could've sworn was about two feet in front of you.