By now it’s obvious that with every animated film comes a video game that hardly meets your expectations (assuming you had one to begin with). Once in awhile you’ll have a kid's game that will surprise you, but Happy Feet isn’t one of those games. After the documentary March of the Penguins, people fell in love with the noble emperor penguin that has to endure some harsh conditions in order to survive. Happy Feet allows kids to enjoy penguins in animated form, as the original documentary really wasn’t targeted towards the young audience. I haven’t seen the movie, but supposedly the game follows the movie’s storyline.You begin the game by watching Mumble, the main penguin, hatch out of his egg. Before he’s even out of the shell, he’s already tapping away. Emperor penguins pride themselves with their “heartsong” but unfortunately for Mumble, he can’t sing, but he sure can dance! Mumble will make new friends along the way, but the road to your goal is composed of three different mini-games.
That’s three mini-games, and only three. You can dance, which consists of hitting the d-pad the same time the arrow gets to the top of your screen. The set up is exactly like Dance Dance Revolution except I don’t think you’ll be whipping out your dance pad for this one. There are three levels of difficulty, however, if you want to spruce things up, but even then it’s not hard at all.
The other mini-game involves sliding on your belly down a hill of ice and snow. Which is not only fun in real life, but also not so bad in Happy Feet. Mumble goes at a pretty good speed so it’s a lot of fun flying over bumps and ledges and you can even do a flip if you want to get fancy.
The last game is the underwater swimming game. You have a limited amount of air so you need to swim over air bubbles to make sure you have enough air. The game is on a track, so you just really need to control what level you plan on swimming at and swerve left and right.
So that’s it when it comes to the entire game. It’s basically three games that are repeated. They’ll throw in something different like you need to collect music notes as you’re sliding on your belly, or you need to go through hoops when you’re swimming. The songs are all fun and catchy, but the gameplay doesn’t exactly make it all that stimulating.
The graphics are decent, mostly due to the fact that the penguins are adorable, but I’m sure you’d get much better graphics if you just watched the movie instead. The penguins’ movements are a little awkward, but as long as they’re just standing there, they’re nice to look at. The music was very well done as a whole. It has a good soundtrack with fun songs for Mumble to tap to. The voice acting is also great, little Mumble’s voice is incredibly cute and fits the role. But these are the highlights of the game, so you’re better off watching the real deal.
I can’t really recommend this game to anyone unless they really love penguins and just can’t get enough of it. I would really like to see the movie once it comes out on DVD. I just couldn’t bring myself to really get into this game because the gameplay is just too repetitive. They could have at least come out with a few more mini-games or maybe some that were more engaging. It’s really too bad because they definitely had the cuteness factor going, and I would think that fans of the movie, especially kids would be drawn to the game.
I am a Canadian living in California with my husband and my precious baby Bailey (95lbs of labrador fun). I work full time and go to school, so finding the time to play video games is tough. I still manage to sneak some time in, whether it's playing on my GBA while I wait in line or sitting in the back seat of my car so I can use our dvd player to play the Gamecube on long trips. I've always been fairly decent at playing games to give my younger brother some competition. I started at the early age of 6 when I inherited an Atari 2600. I played any computer game I could get my hands on during those Commodore 64 days. Now I'll play anything from RPGs to first person shooters, racing games or basically anything that's fun and allows me to play with at least 3 other people.
