
	Platform DS Genre Adventure Publisher Dreamcatcher Interactive Developer Tivola ESRB E (Everyone) Released Q1 2009

- The image of Brendan Fraser looks like Brendan Fraser - It has the movie license - I’m stretching, can you tell?

- The graphics are poorly animated - The mini-games are more fun than the main game - The polish on this game is dull, dull, dull

Review: Legend of Kage 2 (DS) Review: Final Fantasy IV (DS) Review: Spectrobes: Beyond the Portals (DS)
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Inkheart

Score: 3.0 / 10

I love playing classic video games. Nothing beats booting up an Amiga and putting a classic into the old 3.5” disk drive and being reminded of games gone by. It’s strange however to have this feeling when loading up a Nintendo DS game that isn’t a compilation of classic games. When the character sprites in Inkheart started moving on my screen, however, I felt like I was back in the 80’s, only not in a good way.

So let’s get this out of the way. The animation in this game, for the most part, is terrible. The audio is mediocre. Surely, there must be some great gameplay underneath it all. When the game starts up, you have to turn your DS sideways

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because it reads like a book (and hey, it’s based on a movie that’s based on books) – so far so good. My first hope is that this will be as engrossing as Hotel Dusk. Not so much.

You will get reading, so in that sense it’s like a book. You will also have to solve puzzles as you progress through the game and there are even mini-games like a sleigh race and juggling.

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The problem is that these mini-games are actually more fun than the main game.

The story seems to drag on and the puzzles are not particularly hard to figure out. You’ll actually spend more time struggling with the user interface than actually thinking about what you are supposed to do. One bad indication that this game was shipped before it was finished is the fact that at times, menu options that are touch sensitive will appear on the upper screen. No matter how hard I tried, my second (upper) screen on my DS just wasn’t touch sensitive. When the same screen moved back to the bottom screen, it worked. I’m glad I didn’t send back my DS thinking it was at fault. This type of confusion just shouldn’t be happening on a commercial game, especially one with a movie license.

When the graphics aren’t moving they are fairly decent. The image of Brendan Fraser looks just like him (including the great hair). Beyond that, it’s hard to find anything good about this game to talk about.

Take your basic adventure format, dumb it down and slap a movie license on it. Sprinkle in a few mini-games and you’ve got a recipe for disaster. The controls are not innovative, the reading is not interesting and there is little replayability. Oh wait, I forgot. The five mini-games can be played at anytime after you get to the end of the game. If you actually ever make it that far.

If you love the movie, you might want to try this out just to see what it’s all about. If you are hankering for a decent adventure game with a book twist, go grab Hotel Dusk: Room 215. It’s a much better “read”. It’s also a great excuse to use that Rumble Pak just one more time before the Nintendo DSi hits the street.

- Syd Bolton

(April 15, 2009)

Syd Bolton surrounds himself in classic games at the Personal Computer Museum (www.pcmuseum.ca) in Brantford, Ontario, Canada.