Games

Charlie and the Chocolate Factory

Platform: PS2, Xbox, PC
Price: £29.99
Publisher: 2K Games

After a run of games based on movies that, while never spectacular, have been above average it's sadly inevitable that something would come along to remind us how bad these adaptations can be.

Taking Tim Burton's style-over-substance movie of Roald Dahl's novel and stretching the action set pieces out even more thinly, the videogame version of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory is a stale and bitter confection more likely to leave you with indigestion.

The game starts with its best level - a bland but effective chase and race through snow-covered streets as Charlie tries to grab a banknote so he can treat himself to some Wonka candy and maybe win that golden ticket that will allow him access to the fabled halls of the factory.

Once the money is grabbed, things move with indecent haste to the interior of the factory, ignoring all the scale and ceremony that makes the trip so meaningful in both book and movie, and before you know it Willy Wonka is telling you how to give the Oompa Loompa's orders so you can solve the first puzzle - how to free Augustus Gloop from the chocolate pipe system.

Let's put aside the fact that the game has absolutely no sense of narrative at all. It's in such a hurry to get you to the next pointless task that Dahl's wonderful story is steamrollered into mush to facilitate more clumsy leaping and collecting.

No, the first major problem you'll find with this game is how irredeemably ugly it is. Considering how lush the movie looked, the functional level designs here are a tragic waste. The first room - that famous magical meadow of edible grass with the chocolate river and candy trees - is reduced to a grey room with a green floor and a streak of brown down the middle. Stumpy looking scenery juts out sporadically. It looks small and cheap, the complete opposite to the emotions this first introduction to Wonka's world should inspire.

The gameplay is the next stumbling block, as the Oompa Loompa's are impossible to control or guide. In theory you find them, and get them to follow you with a press of a button. You then lead them to whichever Wonka machine needs to be operated to progress, and set them to work. What actually happens is you keep pressing the button until you find the needlessly precise area that will actually make the Oompa Loompa notice you, and then try to guide the idiotic cretin past the scenery and numerous invisible barriers. Often, you'll find you've lost all your followers along the way - trapped by their own bargain basement AI.

The route to success is littered with puzzles that are insultingly obvious in nature, but frustratingly impossible to solve thanks to a general lack of objective info and some truly awful controls. It's always clear what needs to be done, but you then have to combat the game's bug-ridden construction to work out how it's supposed to work.

One challenge, which involves repeatedly snaring robots in vines and then rolling them over deadly thorns into chutes, can take hours thanks to the inability to actually see where you're rolling. You have to point Charlie in the general direction and hope for the best.

The whole game is full of quirks and glitches like this. Characters flicker, scenery breaks down and polygons collapse into jagged confusion every time the camera gets near. It feels like a half-finished PSOne demo, rather than a major motion picture tie-in on well established next-gen platforms. If you're a parent considering this as a gift for your child, think again. Kids know what they want, and they don't want this.