I have to admit that I loved the first Shrek movie. It had the right type of comedy; it had a great cast of actors providing the voices; it had an interesting twist of having the expected bad guy as the good guy; and it retold the children's stories in a very funny way. The second movie, while not as good overall, had much of the same pluses. I admit that I have not seen the last movie that this game is based on, but I know enough of the plot and such to know that it was more of the same though not as highly reviewed as the first two.

As with most of the games based on movies, I wasn't expecting a breakthrough in gaming or even a superb means of expanding on the world of Shrek. What I was expecting was a decent game that utilized the unique control system of the Wii to allow me to have some laughs mixed with some action.

I'll start off by saying that the game is by no means bad — it just doesn't do anything new or interesting. It is a straightforward, linear action game based on a movie franchise. You take control of the great green ogre as he tries to deal with the aftermath of the king (Fiona's father) "croaking." He is tasked with going to find the heir to the throne and bring him back. The game doesn't tell much in the way of the story as it is just a simple brawler, but it does include bit from the movie's plot as puppet shows - rather than cut scenes - in between each of the stages. That is actually my favorite part of the game.

The controls for the game takes advantage of the Wii controller and nunchaku by allowing the player to shake the remote for the basic attack chains and putting the heavy attack in the shaking of the nunchaku. For the most part, this works well enough; although, the "wind-up" of the heavy attacks takes so long that the enemies are on you and interrupting the attack before you manage to do it. Your movement is controlled by the stick on the nunchaku, and there are various combo super attacks that take advantage of the other buttons.

In each level, you typically use one character through the main part until you reach a point where that character can't advance, and you switch and do a side part with another character — such as Donkey or Puss-in-Boots — to allow the main character through again. There is very little variety, and with the locked camera angle, there is little to see other than the path you are on. They included hidden objects that you can find to increase your score for each part, as well as coins to gather to "buy" things.

Visually, the game is decent — but nothing special either. The animations are a bit on the rough side, but the textures and models looks pretty good in most cases. They managed to capture the overall look of the movie settings but not much more. The lighting looks fairly good in most places, such as fighting it out in a gym at the school with light streaming through the windows, and the effects are nicely done for the magical creatures.

The game doesn't do anything very memorable for sounds other than the poor voice acting. They used sound-alike actors that do an OK job at times but fail to recreate the great job that the actors from the movies do with their characters. They pop up at times using lines that the characters would say, but their delivery is awkward at most.

There is a decent amount of multiplayer games included in the game as well, but none of them held my attention for very long. They could be amusing for a group of younger players competing against each other to capture the castle or wrangle some frogs but didn't go much further than that.

Shrek the Third did everything one would expect from a movie-licensed game. You have decently fun, if not straightforward, game play with little room for the player to move beyond the plot of the movie. I can see an adult fan of the series enjoying the gameplay and story, and I know that the younger audience would thoroughly enjoy running around as the big green guy and beating up the bad guys, but I recommend it as a rental or a discounted price purchase.