It is finally that time of the year again when the temperature begins to rise, daylight sticks around a bit longer, and kids find themselves with an inordinate amount of free time on their hands. Not surprisingly, it is also in this season of the year when you’ll find a large supply of summer blockbusters and family-friendly films hitting your local theaters.
Because of these factors, summer is also when you’ll likely notice a deluge of often subpar movie tie-in video games flooding store shelves in order to capitalize on their theatrical counterpart’s hype and marketing campaigns. Sadly, for fans of the film series eagerly looking forward to the video game version of Night at the Museum: Battle of the Smithsonian (BOTS) on the Wii, you should probably prepare yourself for disappointment, as it does very little to buck this trend.
Usually, one of the big draws for any movie tie-in game comes from including the likenesses and voice work of the film’s main characters. BOTS clearly tries to do the right thing here by having Larry Dailey being modeled after and voiced by actor/comedian Ben Stiller, who also played Larry in both Night at the Museum films. Unfortunately, this authenticity is a bit of a double-edged sword, as Larry only resembles Stiller in the vaguest of ways, if at all, even as a video game caricature of himself. This is only made more awkward when listening to the actor’s voice emanating from this poorly done virtualization of Stiller. While this problem will likely only be confusing to the younger gamers playing BOTS, the lifeless and often humorless dialogue delivered by Stiller is enough to turn away an audience of any age. Having not seen the film, I can’t say whether or not this game actually uses voice clips taken directly from the movie, but for the sake of movie goers everywhere, I’ll continue to hope not.
Presentation continues to be a problem for BOTS both during the game and in its many cutscenes. The museum itself and the game’s other environments don’t look too shabby, but most of the game’s characters are fairly bland-looking and animate rather stiffly. Cutscenes, while abundantly represented in BOTS, look pretty bad. It isn’t that these clips can’t be entertaining or are inherently hideous for what they are, but they commonly look unnecessarily blocky, as though they’re being played in a lower resolution than the rest of the game. This is really disappointing considering these scenes appear almost constantly throughout BOTS in order to further the story, deliver your next objective, or as an attempt to inject more humor into your current situation.
The premise of the game is probably about what you’d expect from a game based on BOTS. Following the magical tablet that brings museum exhibits to life, Larry winds up in, you guessed it, the Smithsonian. Here, Ahkmenrah’s evil brother Kahmunrah gets his hands on this tablet and plans on using it to take over the world. To better his chances for success he enlists the aid of such historic figures as Napoleon, Al Capone, and Ivan the Terrible by giving each of them a number of ingots taken from the tablet. It is then up to Larry to foil Kahmunrah’s plans by defeating his newfound minions and reclaiming all of the distributed ingots. Of course, Larry isn’t entirely on his own throughout this quest, as he’ll come into contact with friendly historical figures like Amelia Earhart, Ben Franklin, and even a fairly unstable Abraham Lincoln along the way.
As far as actually playing BOTS goes, it definitely has its share of ups and downs. Instead of following the typical formula found in most movie tie-in games that has players attacking their way through endless waves of goons en route to the game’s finale, BOTS actually has no direct player combat whatsoever.
Players will instead use a mixture of their keychain for shielding themselves and grappling numerous ledges and their flashlight for basically everything else. Each ingot the player retrieves returns one power to the flashlight, which range anywhere from repairing various items to being able to control animals. Properly utilizing these powers allows players to solve a multitude of puzzles throughout the game, which in turn allows them to progress through the story. Some highlights of these include making a rhinoceros smash through any locked gates standing in your way as well as animating several antagonistic paintings in order to help defeat a boss.
Unfortunately, the rest of the gameplay found in BOTS isn’t as pleasant. Players will be required to do a healthy amount of platforming while in the Smithsonian. The issues here are that perspective adjustment is often necessary due to a lazy camera, and jumping as Larry is frequently difficult to judge and even feels unmanageable at times. One part of the game in particular that perfectly embodies these flaws has Larry jumping from airplane wing to airplane wing high above the museum floor. Players will need to constantly fight with the D-pad to get a useable camera angle for their next jump as they also use their flashlight to repair the next airplane to get it moving, all while trying to judge just how far away the next wing is, since it is next to impossible to make Larry provide anything less than a full leap. Retrying this same scenario, and others similar to it, multiple times due to the game’s unwieldy platforming can quickly become frustrating to say the least.
Least is also a regrettably accurate way to describe BOTS’s gameplay value as well. Besides the meager two hour (at best) campaign, there really isn’t much else to do here. You can always find all of the collectibles scattered throughout the game but most will be easily discovered during your first play through. There are three mini-games to unlock and play through, but they aren’t all that entertaining and are simply puzzles taken directly from the campaign. When it comes down to it, BOTS is just an anemic offering when compared to most movie tie-in games and feels downright criminal when you factor in how much it would cost to just watch the actual film it is based on that runs about the same length. If you have to choose between the two, movie tickets would definitely seem like a much better value.
RATING OUT OF 5 RATING DESCRIPTION 2.2 Graphics
The environments don’t look horrible, but is Larry seriously supposed to look like Ben Stiller? I hope not. 2.3 Control
Making use of your flashlight and keychain is mostly pain-free, but constantly fighting with the camera and missing jumps gets old quickly. 2.6 Music / Sound FX / Voice Acting
At least Larry sounds like Ben Stiller even if his delivery doesn’t do the dialogue any favors. 1.8
Play Value
You’ll breeze through this game in about two hours and have nothing left but three mini-games pulled directly from the story and perhaps a few collectibles to find. A real travesty when you consider that watching the film takes just about as long but is much cheaper.
2.1 Overall Rating – Poor
Not an average. See Rating legend above for a final score breakdown.
Game Features: