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Konami releases an interactive version of recently released film.
Konami’s version of Wallace & Gromit: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit follows the child-friendly formula of DreamWorks Animation’s movie of the same name. The game centers on the dynamic duo of Wallace and Gromit who goofily behave as they get themselves into all sorts of situations.
The game follows the plot of the movie. At its gist, the game focuses on Wallace, the inventor, and Gromit, the dog, as they battle a crazy rabbit with sights on destroying all of the vegetable of the world. The plot isn’t particularly engrossing in substance, but the typical and largely amusing Wallace & Gromit humor comes through. The game does a good job of familiarizing itself with the brand, providing for a good licensed game. The plot doesn’t really lend itself to incredibly diverse gameplay and this also shows. The game is very similar to Frontier’s last Wallace & Gromit game, Frontier Zoo.
The basic gameplay has you chasing rabbits in order to stop them from destroying the vegetables. As Wallace, Gromit or Hutch (a new, friendly rabbit), you’ll need to gather rabbits and lead them to holes to prevent them from causing further trouble. If the digging gets a bit repetitive, the game throws in a vacuum gun for you to suck up the rabbits and then manually drop them into the holes. You can also grab objects with the gun to throw at the enemies to temporarily stun them. Additionally, you can grab vegetables to make sure that they are out of the reach of the rabbits. You can switch between the three characters and will sometimes be forced to by the game since one of the characters will have to do something while another hits a switch, for example.
The game’s visuals very accurately re-create the style of the film. The character models are definitely identifiable and look very close to those used in the films, but they are still pretty elementarily 3D. The game’s environments are decent, though you’ll usually be doing the same thing in each one so they tend to blend together. The game does have some nice visual effects like sunlight coming in through windows and the tornado effect of the vacuum.
The game’s audio equally performs. The background music isn’t particularly exciting but does fit the game well. The sound effects, again, are nothing extraordinary but are certainly fitting. The voice work is strong, made particularly effective because of the good dialogue that excellently captures the humor of the license.
Wallace & Gromit: The Curse of the Were-rabbit isn’t a particularly strong game but it isn’t poor either. Younger fans of the license or movie will definitely enjoy it since the developer was able to capture the style of the series so well. Older gamers will probably not get a lot of mileage out of the game since the core gameplay is so simplistic, but it should be just enough for younger fans. -- Michael Taylor, PGNx Media
---- Oct 6, 2005
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