The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe review

Large cats, hook-nosed, wart-infested Wicca devotees and a large wooden box full of clothes is a combination that would normally inspire little but confusion in the average human being. But when C.S.Lewis found great fame in writing a book of the idea, that preposterous mixture bore a hole in the hearts of many people to afflict them with nothing but love and admiration.

After many years, the book finally made the transfer to the silver screen, and of course any big movie usually gets a video game. The idea behind Narnia is an antique wardrobe that transports a bunch of kids during a game of hide-and-seek to a wintry-wonderland with a distinct lack of wonder. Once it's made knowledge to the children that this alternate reality is under the thumb of a very cold (Hah!) witch, they see nothing left to do but become wide-eyed superheroes and end this reign of terror.

Wardrobe Malfunction

The 15 levels see you, as the player, controlling each of the four characters: Peter, Susan, Edmund and Lucy; easily interchangeable with a swift depression of the R1 button. Some levels leave you with only two playable characters whilst the others are off performing a task of some sort, but most of the time you'll have all at your disposal.

The system with which you change between characters takes a little getting used to at the beginning, and although your familiarity clearly increases the more you play, the rate at which it's required increases correspondently, and that's when its graceless nature shows its head . Alongside the irregular but fixed camera, coordinating attacks that rely on the fast switch of characters gets far more difficult, and despite this not posing that much of a problem after the learning curve, it can result in a few deaths irrespective of the player's decisions.

Upgrade-me-do

Once you've selected the necessary character you desire to tackle a certain task or puzzle, the problem of your team A.I poses more of a threat than the actual enemies in that they do nothing but follow you around if not activated.

The element of team play is lost in this scenario as all children but the one you've selected fade into redundancy – waiting around for you to bring them back to life almost. This of course means that all enemies on screen focus on killing you, and you only, and without the help of the other children, this can seem a little unfair.

It is possible, however, and with the help of upgrades, purchased by the coins you collect throughout the game, special abilities make short work of most enemies. My only fault with this character development feature is that it seems to have been included for the wrong reasons. Upgrade systems like that in The Matrix: Path of Neo try to entice the player into selecting the appropriate upgrade for a specific level, but Narnia creates no such thing. As soon as an upgrade is earned, the player can buy it straight away as they will always have ample coins. This makes a system designed for diversity painfully linear, and although it is rewarding working towards the power ups, it probably would've made more sense to just give it to the player as soon as it's available.

Appealing Vision?

Once they are though, Narnia makes for a good few hours of entertainment. Each of the characters is varied in look and feel just as they are in the movie extracts – of which extend far beyond the narrative of the game. The puzzling and problem solving aspects of Narnia do feel a little tacked on, but they do nonetheless break up the relentless battering of hordes of ogres or wolves.

That said fact, however, doesn't bode well for the game's replayability, or lack thereof, as that is essentially what it consists of. Although it is a winning formula to a certain extent, the hack/slash-puzzle, hack/slash-puzzle (repeat until paralysed) method of game play doesn't give the player much to look forward to once they're aware of the repetition. This doesn't make the game unplayable after a few levels, but it sure does make you question whether you want to go back to it after a four hour session.

The appearance of Narnia would be, especially to fans of the book/film, appealing to everyone. Although the character models lack detail, such a pedantic loss has no gauge on the overall presentation that, might I add, is rather impressive. All levels run with an admirable fluidity; experiencing slow-down only during extremely intense battles, and in spite of the dodgy fixed camera, the vibrancy and epic feel that the graphics bring to the game make playing it a lot more rewarding than you'd think.

Shaved Cat

My pockets are full of denouncements for this game; it undoubtedly has its fair share, but I would have to say that as far as movie-to-video game conversions go this one of the lesser evils.

Every aspect of it truly captures the very essence of the movie; the puzzles, the fighting, the overwhelming burden of taking on an evil witch when you've barely stopped wetting the bed, they're all here. But once again, that movie title has instilled the element of complacency within the developers that is oh-so common in these circumstances, and that ill-founded contentment made for some seemingly tacked-on and just plain annoying attributes.

Narnia is a slay ride with Santa Claus level of novelty for big fans of the books and/or movies, but a simplistic, repetitive but sometimes fun fantasy-action game for anyone else. Who are you gonna be?