Over the last few months, I’ve been surprised by a couple of movie tie-ins that, on the face of it, weren’t supposed to be anything like good games. Despite this, the feeling that I got when Ubisoft’s Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs tie-in landed on my desk, was one of extreme apprehension. Mainly, because Ubisoft’s tie-ins are usually…ahem…’Poor with a Relatively Certain Chance of Being Put Together in Less Than a Month.’ But hey, it seems that a ton of people loved the movie, so I thought I’d head in to the game with as open a mind as I could.
At first glance, everything seems to be ship-shape. Characters look almost as smooth as they did on the big screen, and the game world is relatively well realised. Gameplay itself consists of you, playing as Flint (or with a second player in the handy drop-in/drop-out co-op mode) as he attempts to correct the problems that his machine – which causes giant food to rain from the sky – has caused. Levels generally revolve around the use of one of Flint’s wacky inventions, such as a heat gun that melts colder food such as ice-cream and lollies, or a mechanical fork that eats its way through Ravioli. Initially, there’s some confusion due to the lack of any sort of tutorial. Sure, the controls are simple – left stick to move, triggers to activate the currently selected gadget, bumpers to change the active gadget (when carrying more than one) – but there’s very, very little indication as to what you have to actually DO. It doesn’t take more than a few seconds to work out that firing the heat gun at the lollies will melt them and open up a new pathway, but – bearing in mind that you can’t actually move the camera to look at anything – some things can be hard to see. Take one of the other levels in the first act, where you have to locate eight pieces of giant broccoli, and destroy them in order to clean up the Jelly Castle. Yes, the Jelly Castle. You find the first five without trouble, but with no indication as to where the others are, and no way of looking around other than to wander aimlessly until you hit upon something, you’re left doing exactly that for far longer than you’d like.
Some levels require a little traditional thought though, and this is to the game’s credit. Sucking up that coffee (I think it’s coffee, the game doesn’t say and it just looks like a brown puddle of liquid) with your vacuum-style gadget and spraying it at the giant sugar cubes will melt them for example, whereas sucking up honey and firing it at a wall makes the wall sticky enough for you to climb. None of these puzzles are particularly taxing but if you have smaller children, some of them may require a little adult assistance via that drop-in/drop-out co-op mode. Some of the puzzles do seem to be kind of innovative and interesting when you see them for the first time. There’s a sense of “oh, I CAN actually do that!” when you come up with a solution to a problem where the game’s general restrictiveness hints that you’ll not be able to get away with it. But, that innovation and interest lasts for approximately three seconds. After that, the game takes that good idea and slaps you around the face with it, making you carry out the same task twenty or thirty times in a row in order to progress. There’s flogging a dead horse, and there’s inventing the horse, killing it and THEN flogging it. This game does the latter.
Ultimately, Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs isn’t what you’d call anything groundbreaking. In fact, you could say that we’re taking a step back to when movie tie-ins actually were all just rubbish. The game as a whole is very, very short and restrictive, and the throwaway one-liners that the characters fire out are repetitive to the point of making you want to turn the console off. Even when you’re given the choice of which gadgets to use to beat the levels that are thrown your way, nothing really draws you in and makes you want to play. This is one for the kids who really, really enjoyed the movie and who aren’t fussy about what they play.
