Review: G-Force (DS)
In this game you play a Guinea Pig super-hero by the name of Darwin who is part of a team of Guinea Pigs and they are out to stop a great evil from doing something it shouldn’t be doing. Darwin has an electric whip which you must to smash open countless boxes in order to collect what appears to be giant computer chips and these are used to unlock various items during the game.
It’s just my luck that I have to review not one but two videogames, this and GI Joe: Rise of Cobra, which are based on movies I haven’t seen. There is a chance that GI Joe may have a semi-detailed script but I really doubt that’s the case for G-Force and since I haven’t seen it I can’t comment on how closely this game sticks to events in the movie. What I can tell you is that the script in this game is pretty dire and while this may not matter to a young child I’m sure parents expert a certain degree of quality from their purchases.
There’s this one guy named Saber who appears to be very surprised any time he asks a simple question, such as “satellite tracking locked in??”. Now, I don’t know about you but the use of double question marks is an indication of someone feeling shocked and this is best saved for a question along the lines of “my socks are made of jelly??”. Note: Saber’s socks aren’t made of jelly and that’s a shame because it may have made this game more enjoyable.
This game is filled with dumb lines. Some kid is sitting in his room and his mother shouts upstairs, to inform the boy that she has prepared him something to eat, and feels the need to tell him that he must wash his bands before he heads downstairs. Why? It’s not as if he is in the bathroom. Is that woman’s house so incredibly dirty that people are constantly required to wash their hands before eating anything?
At another point in the game an alarm goes off and Darwin, in his infinite wisdom, says “that’s not wedding bells”. I guess that statement of fact is included for kids who struggle to tell the difference between wedding bells and a security alarm. Having said that, I’m sure that some cynics will suggest that wedding bells should be treated as a sign of impending danger.
At various points in the game the camera is really tight to the back of Darwin and this meant I had to spin round often to discover items which were directly beside me and this really messed with my motion sickness. I know that most of you will not be affected by motion sickness but one thing which will affect you is turning round quickly and falling off ledges because you can’t see the edge of the platform even when it’s right next to your feet. I accept that I have less patience than the average six year old but there’s only so many times you can climb up the same drainpipe before you get really tired of it.
I found both the graphics and sound to be very average in this game but I don’t expect this game to improve much on a beefier system capable of far superior graphics. It is one of those cases where I can see how a young child might be perfectly content with how this game looks but adults, with a little more videogame experience, are bound to look at this and question the level of effort in the visual department. This game would no doubt benefit from 2D visuals which I feel is a perfectly acceptable look for a platform game of any generation.
As I haven’t seen the film it is possible that G-Force is the greatest animation to ever grace the big screen but what I can tell you is that the same can’t be said of this videogame adaptation. The main character looks cute because tiny animals tend to be that way but there is something pretty wrong when I find those TV adverts for the Egg credit card which also feature guinea pigs to be more appealing. The script is at times laughable, and not in a good way, while the repetitive gameplay will get on your nerves after a short amount of time with the game.
All in all this is a very average platform game which alludes to some sort of huge adventure but it never really gets off the ground. There are much better platform games on the DS and you should avoid this one unless you, or your child, really loves the film and its main character.
5/10
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