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Toys for Bob and Activision tie in a game to the latest Dreamworks release.
Madagascar: Escape 2 Africa stars King Julien, who wants to create a travel brochure. He figures that the best way to do this is to take pictures of the animals in particular activities so he tasks them with completing these activities. Once Julien gets enough of these shots he has the animals go back to New York. As you can guess from the title, they end up in Africa instead. The story is told through CG and in-game cutscenes. Overall, the story is cute and clever and seemingly based on the recently released movie.
In Escape 2 Africa, you’ll play as Marty the zebra, Gloria the hippo, Melman the giraffe, and the crafty Penguins. The game also introduces new characters from the movie such as Alex the lion’s father and Moto Moto, Gloria’s love interest. As these characters, you’ll engage in platforming and completing minigames to accomplish the tasks set out by Julien. These include everything from winning a soccer match, catching butterflies, treating sick animals, loading baggage, among other things. Completing these levels will give you bucks that you can spend at the Duty Free Shop to buy clothes and additional content.
The game also includes an Arcade mode, where you can play one of the ten minigames. These include Diving Event (character takes a high dive and does tricks), Hot Durian! (hot potato), Juicy Juicy! (collect certain fruit pieces), Jungle Chess (chess), Melman's Clinic (similar to operation), Mini-Golf (mini-golf), Monkey Match (memory), Musical Chairs (musical chairs), Soccer (soccer), and Volcano Rave (rhythm game where you match dance moves).
Visually, the game follows the movie’s visual style pretty well. The characters look very much like their film counterparts, down to the great animation. The environments share a similar level to detail and look quite good, too. As expected, the PS3 and Xbox 360 version of the game sport the sharpest textures, most detailed characters, and fanciest lighting effects but the Wii and PS2 versions look quite good for their respective platforms.
The game’s audio is fairly solid though not amazing. The sound effects are comical and sound great. The soundtrack is pretty catchy overall not nothing especially memorable. Like Madagascar before it, Activision didn’t license the movie’s characters although the soundalikes do a convincing enough job.
Madagascar: Escape 2 Africa is a fun platformer, definitely aimed at younger gamers and fans of the series. It’s a charming, quirky, and ultimately fun game. -- Jose Liz, PGNx Media
---- Nov 9, 2008
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