Game review: Princess and the Frog - Nintendo DS (From Croydon Guardian)

Game review: Princess and the Frog - Nintendo DS

3:25pm Wednesday 17th March 2010 in

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Disney’s The Princess and the Frog isn’t the worst game that’ll come out this year for Nintendo DS, the problem is it suffers from the same mediocrity complex which afflicts most movie tie-ins.

Somewhere during the creative process most of the fun and charm of the films that games are based on get sucked out, leading to products which are bland and largely forgettable.

The Princess and the Frog is a typical case - it’s neither a great representation of its box office source material nor an interesting game when it stands alone.

Rather than being a release which kid and adult gamers alike can get excited about, it ends up coming across as being yet another piece of movie-related merchandise designed to cash in on cinema success.

My seven-year-old daughter who usually loves all things Disney started off really getting into this game, but even she drifted away from it after just a couple of weeks, the novelty value of playing as Princess Tiana (albeit in frog form for much of the game) wearing thin quicker than I expected.

The main issues this game suffers from are muddled gameplay and poor structure.

The game takes place during the middle part of the jazz-fuelled New Orleans-set cartoon.

Taking on the role of Tiana (assisted by firefly Ray) players must work through a series of search-and-find platform levels.

These involve jumping, swinging and transforming enemies into usable objects.

The levels themselves are quite small but what holds you up is having to perform quests for other characters who you come across.

Your reward for completing tasks is collecting ingredients and recipes which activate the cooking mini game.

Developer Griptonite presumably had something like Cooking Mama in mind when devising this mini game, but it comes across more like a limp side salad than a tasty hot main course.

You are presented with a cooking pot with two meters which you must keep an eye on. One represents the temperature of your pot, the other shows how close you are to completing whatever dish you’ve been asked to prepare.

Following on-screen prompts you stir the pot while sometimes dragging spices into it using the stylus and other times blowing into the mic to keep your pot from overheating.

It’s a clever enough system but the game becomes completely useless when you’re asked to do exactly the same thing no matter what dish you’re making or whether the recipe would actually need a big cooking pot if you were making the dish in real life.

Another mini game has you playing along to a couple of songs on a virtual piano. Again it’s a reasonable enough concept, but it’s rendered totally pointless as soon as you discover you can play anything you like (or nothing at all if you prefer) instead of playing notes in the right sequence.

The idea is that jazz is supposed to be based around winging it, but this game is likely to be too simplistic even for kids.

The mini games kind of let the side down because the platforming, while slightly tedious and unexciting, isn’t terrible. At least parts of it are quite challenging.

Graphics, animations and sound in the game are all competent without ever being dazzling. The game looks nice enough, although it doesn’t get anywhere near matching the visual quality of the movie, which is a shame because if it did it might cover up some of the holes in the gameplay.

As I said at the outset, The Princess and the Frog isn’t the worst game to come out for DS. In fact, as movie conversions go it’s about par for the course.

It’s just a shame a fun and vibrant cartoon film has been translated into a lacklustre and run-of-the-mill platform game. The style of game isn’t any different from film tie-ins I was playing years ago on more basic gaming devices and these days I’d expect to see a bit more inventiveness.

Verdict: 5 out of 10 – Some avoidable design flaws, particularly in the mini games, damage what is otherwise an OKish movie tie-in title.

Watch The Princess and the Frog Nintendo DS trailer: