Best Left on the Silver Screen
Video games based on movie licenses have had a long and rocky history. Movie licensed games have ranged anywhere from the abysmal E.T. (Atari 2600) to the stellar Goldeneye (N64). Unfortunately, more often than not, most tend to end up much closer to the E.T. end of this scale. Sadly, this is exactly where The Golden Compass’s licensed game effort fits in. It isn’t quite popular or bad enough to cause a video game crash like E.T. did, but it is still terrible enough to make you question its existence.
The game’s story revolves around an incredibly intelligent and headstrong girl named Lyra and her faithful protector Iorek. Iorek is easily the best character in the game. He is a massive polar bear that basically feels like a good mix between the Coca-Cola bears and a Klingon. Iorek appears cute and cuddly until someone attempts to harm Lyra in any way, and then you experience his battle loving, scarier side. You will follow both characters throughout the game while they try to unravel the mysteries of the Golden Compass and foil an evil plot to hurt thousands of innocent children.
Since this is a game based on a movie that should do well in the box office, you would think that the storyline would at least make you want to play through this game. Unfortunately, this is not the case. While the storyline is interesting and there are plenty of good quality movie clips used in this game, there are a ton of noticeable plot gaps throughout. For example, in one level you will be fighting against a plethora of angry witches bent on your destruction. A few levels later, some seemingly identical witches (I’m still not sure if they were supposed to be the same ones or not) are helping you fight another foe with absolutely no explanation as to why or how this occurred. This is just one example of this horrible problem, but rest assured, there are more holes in this game’s plot than in a large block of Swiss cheese. During the course of the game, there will be quite a few times you will be scratching your head trying to figure out what is happening, or why, in the story.
Thankfully, most players won’t even make it far enough into the game to have to worry about these storyline issues. When you first start playing Golden Compass, you will quickly notice that the game looks horrible, plays worse, and has terrible pacing issues. These flaws will hit you very quickly, almost begging you to turn the power off on your game system and just wait to see the movie. While the backgrounds won’t hurt your eyes too badly, the characters in this game would look bad even if it had been released on the Dreamcast. The character models look horrific and are also poorly animated for good measure. After seeing this game in action, I honestly think that it was so rushed that they just made a sub par PSP version of this game and ported it over to the PS2 to save time.
For about the first two to three hours of this game, you will actually not be able to play for more than five minutes at a time. This is an unfortunate result of just how convoluted the gameplay in this title is and how the game chooses to teach you how to play. Golden Compass will give you an objective and have you attempt to complete it. As you try to actually complete this objective, the game will pause and describe how to do something. This happens so frequently that it almost feels like you are watching a video based instruction manual for the first few hours. Since this game is clearly aimed at a fairly young player, it is inexcusable for it to be this slowly paced and needlessly complex to play.
Much of Golden Compass gameplay basically boils down to a fairly uninspired 3D-action game with a minimal amount of platforming thrown in to spice things up a little. You will get to play as either Lyra, Iorek, or both on your quest. The segments that you play as Iorek are definitely the most enjoyable part of this game. Most of Iorek’s levels will have you running around and attacking anything that moves. While his attacks are fairly limited, mostly just pressing a button multiple times for combos or another button for a group attack, there is enough depth present to make these levels somewhat amusing.
Lyra’s levels, on the other hand, are not incredibly fun. These levels contain a decent amount of platforming, the problem being that there just isn’t enough of it. More often then not, you will just end up completing a ton of fetch quests, mini-gaming your way through countless conversations and trying your best to avoid enemies. If you do happen to get into a tussle with an enemy, the game will force you into the same mind-numbing evasion game every time. These will have your opponents mindlessly running at you and into whatever is behind you if you successfully dodge them. Lyra’s evasion mini-games are incredibly boring and really make you wish you were just playing as Iorek instead.
Unfortunately, these 3D action segments of the game mostly just serve as the glue for a slew of poorly made, nonsensical, incredibly tedious, and randomly strung together mini-games and quick time events. Want to talk to someone? Time for a horrible mini-game to see how you’ll respond. Need a bridge to continue on your quest? Here comes another uninspired series of button presses to complete to create one. While there are a large variety of mini-games and quick time events in the game, you will still end up playing the same ones over and over again. Not only are these events and mini-games not fun to play, they serve to completely destroy any semblance of fun or pacing the 3D-action part of the game tries to provide.
This game is clearly a rushed mess, and perhaps should have taken a nod from the Superman Returns video game and not been released until The Golden Compass inevitable DVD release. If Shiny had been given more time to work on this game, I really think that it could have been at least a somewhat enjoyable experience. In the game’s current form though, I would strongly urge anyone interested in playing it to reconsider. While the movie may end up being great, the game should probably just be laid to rest atop the thousands of copies of E.T. that are rumored to be buried in a New Mexico landfill.
Features:
RATING OUT OF 5 RATING DESCRIPTION 1.5 Graphics
The game’s adequate looking backgrounds are littered with some of the worst looking characters this side of the Dreamcast. 2.2 Control
With terrible hit detection and somewhat buggy context sensitive inputs, Golden Compass just isn’t a fun game to control. 3.8 Music / Sound FX / Voice Acting
With good music and voice over talent from the movie, this is definitely one of the major highlights of this game. 1.2 Play Value
This game is just really no fun to play. You are constantly forced to play terrible minigames and quick time events that take you out of the experience. 1.7 Overall Rating – Avoid
Not an average. See Rating legend above for a final score breakdown.