Review: Rise of the Guardians

It is missing one of the most crucial aspects of movie-tie in games, and that is actual cut-scenes from the movie. Now I don’t know whether the movie studio’s were holding out on the scenes due to wanting to keep everything about the movie quiet or not, but it has harmed the game, as it is a lot weaker for not having the scenes. The other aspect is that whilst it kind of follows the story-line of the movie, it also differs a lot in certain aspects. This made it seem like I was playing a very rushed version of the game.

However once you get past the fact that the story-line is vastly different from the film, it is a fairly enjoyable game. You can control any of the five main characters, North, Tooth, Bunny, Sandy or Jack Frost, and each one has a different area that is there land. Tooth has her Palace, and Bunny has his Warren, but you also get to explore different areas such as Sandy’s spaceship. You also get to explore Pitch’s lair, but you only get to run down a single corridor to go down and fight Pitch. However, apart from Pitch’s lair, each area is deceptively large, and to complete each one to it’s fullest extent will take a couple of hours per level.

The downside to the levels being so large is that you have to play the same few mini-games over and over again if you want to be able to progress. Unfortunately you can’t even skip to the main battles with Pitch as you have to play through numerous mini-games to actually get to the battles with Pitch. There aren’t even a set amount of mini-games to get through on each level, it is just random. On my particular play-through I only completed 3 levels out of the possible 5 before I had actually beaten the final boss.

With the maps being so large, there are a lot of treasures to be found, unfortunately there is absolutely no excitement in looking for these as these due to the fact that each treasure is pointed out on the map, so there is no need to go searching. It is just laid out for you.

Overall this is an OK game, it isn’t brilliant, it’s fairly flawed, but it is enjoyable. If you want to keep your kids entertained over the winter holidays you could do worse than this game.

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