Another new movie and
another game based on a movie. But this time the movie is based upon a classic
series of books. At E3 2005 Buena Vista Games was showing off an early version
of the game. In case you’re wondering what book the game is based upon it’s The
Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe.
The surprising part that
too many gamers at E3 didn’t know about Narnia was the game is an action game
with heavy emphasis on combat. The demo I played allowed you to control all of
the children from the movie. Each character had their own attacks which helps
in keeping the action somewhat varied. But the combat was really a hack ‘n
slash game where you had an almost endless amount of creatures attacking and you
just kept hitting them.
A nice feature of the
game was the ability to have the children team up for specific moves. There was
a section in the demo I played where there was a tree down blocking a path to
the next part of the stage. None of our attacks would damage the tree but by
teaming up the two girls I was able to use their combined attacks to break the
tree. This helps in creating a large amount of different moves to use during
combat since you can team up the characters with each other.
Since there are three
characters, you can switch out between the characters at anytime with the press
of a button. Quick and easy to perform, this helps in determining which
character you will need to use for a particular spot in the game. Unfortunately
the demo didn’t expand on the feature too much since it was just non-stop
action. Using the boy was the best bet since he was the strongest character.
The graphics in the game
looked good but nothing that will wow anyone. Out of the different versions on
display I thought the PS2 version looked better than the Xbox or GC versions.
There were some nice graphic effects that did bring out a little bit of a WOW
factor. The level at E3 had you walking around on a frozen lake pond while some
large birds were dropping rocks on you. The rocks would break through the ice
which looked good along with some nice reflection of the characters on the ice.
BVG stated the game was
really in alpha stage so there is still a bunch of work to be done. The movie
doesn’t come out until late this year so hopefully there should be plenty of
time to get the game in shape. Fans of the book will probably be surprised at
the amount of action but that shouldn’t keep them from giving the game a try.
The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe was a classic book so maybe, just maybe,
the game could become a classic as well.
