So, I've been playing The Golden Compass for about 6 hours now. I think I'm about halfway through. I also think I've got a good handle on the game by now. In all honesty I think I can describe the experience using two words. On the one hand one of these words is "good". On the other hand the preceding word is "not".
Before I briefly touched on the reasons why movie adaptations are usually pretty poor. This game demonstrates pretty much everything I said. Oh, where to begin?
Firstly I suppose I should correct one of my initial suppositions. I thought this would be doubly bad as it was the game of the film of the book. But I neglected to properly take into account the fact that I was playing on the Wii. Obviously I don't consider the Wii a bad console or I wouldn't own one, but it has become clear to me that cross platform releases invariably suffer on the system as they sloppily ported across with a bit of token waggle instead of the occasional button press rather than actually being developed for the system itself. So what we actually have here is the port of the game of the film of the book. By all rights there is no way anyone could play something with that many iterative qualifications and not kill themselves.
The fact that I haven't yet is testament to the fact that at least SOMEONE was trying to make a half decent game. That or modern life really has numbed me to all but the most shocking atrocities.
The most obvious thing about the game is how unfinished it feels. The opening prelude feels tacked on, basically being there to demonstrate that you will get to be a bear an punch things in the face. Then you're back to the actual start of the story and everything non bear related that you were introduced to gets introduced again. Things proceed well enough to start with, but you quickly realize that there's a lot of stuff that's been cut out in order to get the thing finished in time. The first and most noticeable of these being the camera controls. When you're running around in a platforming / exploration type game mode it would be REALLY helpful to actually see around you and where you're actually meant to be going. Although for all the exploration touted on the box the levels are rather small or linear. The next thing they left out was any chance of actually following the plot. Since big chunks of it are missing, presumed absent. Instead we get some VERY brief clips from the movie and the implicit assumption that we know whats supposed to be happening so we don't actually need to be told. The levels do a good enough job of presenting certain parts of the story, however they are so poorly linked together that it you really can't help but wonder if there wasn't supposed to be something else in between. I'll give them points for actually using some movie clips instead of cut scenes, but sadly their not actually enough to impart the story to any coherent degree. Had you no prior knowledge of the story I can't see you following whats meant to be going on with massive ease.
Gameplay wise there is actually some hint of promise. As I said before you've got a bit of exploration and jumping when you're playing as Lyra. They way they use her Daemon and his shape changing ability is actually pretty good. Each mode essentially giving you a different ability to assist you in getting around. However I do have to say that the whole unfinished vibe is still fully in effect, with plenty of places that possess invisible force fields preventing access rather than more sensible level design. Really, if you don't want me to jump over that fence couldn't you just MAKE IT TALLER or something? Bit of barbed wire on the top maybe?
No. No, that would be far to obvious.
Other than this you have to navigate various conversations via the medium of mini games. On paper I'm sure this sounds like a good idea. You compete in these various little games and your success (or lack thereof) affect the dialogue outcome. And it's not an entirely bad idea. It does however get a bit old a bit quick. Whilst they do introduce new minigames as the levels progress this really just means you end up hoping for the or two you're actually good at to come up. Needless to say some are better than others. When confronted with a dangerous situation we get an evasion event, wherein you have to keep dodging the enemy until they concuss themselves to death. This could be interesting but is basically just a quicktime event and therefore not really worth talking about.
One actually interesting thing is the implementation of the titular Golden Compass itself. Even though it never gets called that. But never mind. You do get to use the Aletheometer. As you progress you unlock meanings for the various symbols. You also get questions, each requiring 3 keywords. Should you already have that keyword unlocked then all well and good. Should you not then you need to guess which symbol to set the Aletheometer to. You don't really need all 3, as the divination minigame is doable with only 2, but the more you have the easier it is. This of course does add to the whole exploration aspect, as you can go looking for hidden meanings. However it's not like there's any way of knowing if you've missed any, and no backtracking once a level is complete. This isn't anything you can't overcome with a little intuitive guesswork, but the fact that when you do guess a symbols meaning it isn't added to your list is a rather glaring oversight.
Graphic are not usually something I bother with getting all niggly over, and I fully realize that the Wii isn't a ultrashiny fountain of tedious blingmapping. However this REALLY doesn't look very good. The Wii is capable of doing a LOT better than whats on display here. Maybe it's the result of rushed and dodgy port. Let's just say that things aren't exactly optimised. Seriously, I haven't textures as low res as some of these since I last played Doom. And at least there everything was consistent.
Thus far then we have a fairly rough, obviously unfinished game. Whilst it does feature some good ideas they aren't implemented successfully enough to make up for all the other problems. It's an interesting attempt at non violent gameplay, just not as successful as another 6 months of development time and a bit of polishing would have given us. And of course any pacifistic qualities are soon going to be undercut quite painfully by a very large and angry armour plated bear.
Whether or not the remaining half of the game will actually give me anything new to say remains to be seen.
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