Wall-E

Rating Everyone Genre action Publisher THQ External Links Official THQ Website

Movie to game cross-overs are usually a sure-fire recipe for a media failure, but every once in a while you get a perfectly child ready gem like Wall-E. I do emphasize the target audience of this game, children. Wall-E is a simple puzzler with frequent yet terribly exploitable combat. The game closely parallels the events of the movie, no shock there, but in some regards it differs, choosing to skip certain scenes and opting for more “Wall-E with a laser” fun time. During the games 9+ stages the player will tread boldly forward as Wall-E, the dirty quirky garbage compactor, and fly and shoot across large landscapes as EVE, the iPod of all robots.

With the movies constant homage’s to “Hello Dolly”, the sound track floats back and forth between unending action themes and late 60’s musical theater. One of the title more interesting / less important elements are the occasional tumblers Wall-e can manipulate to cross the one of his choosing. These tumblers are, most often, three-sided rotating object with two of three different sections to change. These changes allow for passage across, no matter the combo. It only changes the style and manner of getting across.

The majority of the puzzles in-game are solved by Wall-E alone and utilize his one technical ‘skill’, crushing trash into compact cubes. These cubes differ depending on what they are primarily composed of. A pile of garbage is called a standard or light cube and can be thrown at enemies and targets to trigger events. A cube made of old iron weights becomes a heavy cube and can be used to encumber a weight puzzle. Finally, power cubes and magnet cubes are used to recharge stations and push away ferrous objects respectively. But again, this title is aimed at a ‘simplier’ audience for lack of use of more derogatory terms.

The puzzles here are neither dangerous or difficult. Normally the answer you seek is just out of sight or hiding around the corner. They could easily have added some substance to the gameplay by offering more difficult terrain or multiple cube-requiring puzzles. The interactions between characters in cut scenes is upsetting, but after seeing a Pixar film, attempting to cram out remotely similar graphics seems just out of our range… for now. All in all, any gaming child with the majority of his or her digits should be able to beat this game in just over the time it took to watch the actual film. Sad but true, this title even after expanding on the Wall-E universe, manages to do that while running the course of the film in just a couple of hours. With easy to obtain unlockables like different outfits and uninspired multiplayer maps, this big budget title becomes little more that a notable rental for the kid with Wall-E on the brain.