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You know Kim don't you? Young Ms. Possible -- perhaps Disney's most popular daytime star; cheerleader and secret agent without peer. She can knock out three bad guys in an afternoon, thwart a couple of plans to take over the world by dinnertime, and still spur the home team on to victory that same night. (Fortunately, there's a lot more emphasis on nefarious doings than on pom-poms.) Kim has made the leap to the DS, with all her usual skills, wisecracks, and panoply of sidekicks and villains. This time around, you’re dealing with Drakken and Shego, as usual, plus Jack Hench, Frugal Lucre and DNAmy.

There are several ways that the DS’s unique features have been incorporated into gameplay. First, to start the game, you’ve got to press the touchpad to give a thumbprint. How cool is that? (In a really geeky way, yes, but cool.) Second, there are a few (not enough) touchpad puzzles — to crack a couple of locked doors, you have to trace a narrow path in a limited amount of time. And third, to help Kim complete a paraglide drop, you have to press keys to slip to the left or right … and you have to blow into the built-in microphone to give her lift when she needs it! There’s only one paraglide drop, but it takes several minutes (and much longer if you have to start over …). The image of Dad, DS clasped in both hands to press the R and L buttons while holding it close to blow into the mike, is worth the price of admission all by itself.

Kim can buy several gadgets along the way, including her trusty grappling hook (don’t leave home without it!), an electronic lockpick that doubles as a hair brush (which will be necessary two or three times), night-vision goggles (necessary once), medkits (you’ll be buying lots of these), and three varieties of stun grenades (absolutely unnecessary). You collect electronic parts along the way, and then trade them for the various gadgets.

Kim’s health is one of the tightest parameters in the game. Kim only has three hit points, and once they’re gone you have to start over at your last save point. In some cases, that’s no hassle; in other cases it makes a lot of difference. This means that to keep going, you have to heal every time you take a couple points of damage. It also means that you have to keep your medkits handy when heading into dangerous territory; you’re in trouble if you also have to be grappling, since you can only have one or the other readied at a time.

This is a side-scroller executed in 3-D, which means that the environment is 3-D while Kim stays on a linear path. Sometimes this can be neat, as she sprints up a hallway toward you, or leaps from ledge to ledge. Sometimes this can be a pain, as she races toward you, but because of the angle you can’t see what’s coming up next. And sometimes it seems lame, as she runs into a column and can’t figure out how to step around it to keep going. We know this is a staple of side-scrollers, but it still just seems wrong to have to jump blindly into space, and hope that there’s something stable for you to clutch onto at the other end.

Kim can change outfits at any point. She starts with her standard adventure suit and a henchman uniform. You can pick up four other outfits along the way, and by plugging previous KP games into the DS, you can get three more. Neat, but (as far as we could tell) they don’t affect gameplay at all. For instance, the henchman uniform doesn’t seem to help avoid detection when she’s slipping through their barracks, and the armored gear doesn’t seem to make her any more resistant to damage. We decided she just looked weird to be adventuring in anything but her adventuring outfit, so we stuck with that.

It’s odd to say for an action game, but the combat is the weakest part of the game. Kim has a wide variety of attacks available — punch, uppercut, quick punch, triple punch, block, kick, leg sweep, jump kick, quick kick, triple kick, flying jump kick … But in nearly every instance, we found that simply repeating kicks, punches or jumps defeats any foe, without any strategy required (which is also why we had no use for stun grenades). If you keep kicking or punching, the enemy doesn’t strike back, so you rarely take damage in combat. The exception to this are the toasters and vending machines in the second stage of the game; they’re a lot tougher than any other combat foe, which is odd since they appear so early in the game.

As with other KP games, you get conversation and direction as you play through the game, and you never are really at a loss for what to do next — as long as you can find the path. But the storyline seems sorta disconnected. You start undercover, testing to qualify as a henchman for Hench. (This also serves as the game’s tutorial area.) As a henchman, you can gain access to the bad guys’ lairs. When you complete your qualification, you flash back to when you first realized there was a problem, and work your way through a superstore that would have customer-relation problems if the customers weren’t all fled or dead.

Once you survive the superstore flashback, you move on to Drakken’s old lair (he’s recently relocated) and DNAmy. She’s throwing genetic combinations at you, starting with crocobunnies and cobra duckies and concluding with a boss skunkorpion. Dad had a lot of trouble with the skunkorpion and the final platforms, but Will thought this was the easiest part of the game (other than Hench’s tutorial), and Jesse thought it was the most fun part.

After you clear out the old lair and realize you need to track down the new lair, you’re paragliding into a volocanic hideout. The enemies here are utilitybots and warbots, plus a few more henchmen you need to avoid. The worst parts of this stage are all the platforms that crumble or collapse when you land on them — you’ve got to keep jumping to cross them, especially when there are several in a row. At the end is a “fight” with Shego, which is really Kim running, jumping, swinging and dodging to get close to her, while Shego maintains a constant barrage of green globs. Combined with steam vents, she can put hurt on you in a hurry.

After all that, your actual showdown with Shego is postponed (until the next game), because you both realize you have to tackle a robot that is on the verge of world domination. (Yeah, Drakken miscalculated again.) The robot is actually pretty easy; you just have to keep moving to avoid it.

And that’s the game. It took us awhile to get through it, but it probably won’t occupy more experienced players for very long. It does have one nice feature (also in previous KP games) that tells you how much you’re accomplished. Even after beating the final robot, we saw we still had about 15% of the game left, which gives us something to go back and explore, even after winning.

Other features identical to or similar to KP: Team Possible include the grappling hook actions and Rufus (you know, the naked mole rat). Rufus is the only other character you play (Ron left him with you when he took off for Norway); you send him off a couple of times to find and disconnect crucial wires. One nice change is that Rufus can keep exploring until he takes too much damage, rather than being limited to a set time.

The bottom line for us is that Kimmunicator is fun, but it didn’t last long enough and it wasn’t as challenging as it could have been.