Pixel Daddy

A surprisingly robust action game that sadly fails to understand its target audience, Disney’s G-Force is exactly the sort of game I set up this site to cover.

If you look at what the gaming press has been saying about G-Force you’ll see lots of surprise at what a polished game it is, as well as lots of conclusions that it’s ideal for kids.

In practice, that’s sadly not the case.

First, the good news. G-Force really is a robustly constructed title. When so many movie tie-ins are still half-hearted lazy efforts, there’s a sheen and a polish to this that deserves praise.

Players control Darwin, the leader of a team of espionage-trained guinea pigs, and Mooch, his fly assistant. Other characters from the movie appear in the story, but gameplay wisely focuses on these two.

These flying enemies attack from a distance with lasers, while the little bug robots hold you in place. Not much fun for younger kids.

Your task is to stop a world domination plot that involves turning electronic household gadgets into mechanised monsters. You do this by making your way through over-sized human locations, achieving objectives along the way.

Darwin has a jet pack and an expanding arsenal of gadgets and weapons to help him in this quest, and he’s also able to interact with computers and switches. Mooch, meanwhile, can buzz up to areas that Darwin can’t reach, and can also use his insect time perception to slow things down, enabling him to dart past fast-moving obstacles.

Everything looks crisp and colourful, and the level of detail is commendable. Few kids games look this good, and any fan of the movie will be thrilled at how successfully it’s been transferred to consoles.

Traversing this room is hard enough, but you also have tough enemies trying to knock you off the platforms. Frustration abounds.

Where the game slips up is in its unforgiving structure. It sounds strange, but it’s almost too good at being a “proper” 3D shooting game.

I found that when left to his own devices, Dillon (aged 7) could only make it a limited way into the game. With unrelenting enemy attacks, progress was held up by near constant combat, and the control system – while perfect for a more mature title – was just too complex for him to grasp under the pressure.

Enemies take the form of mutated appliances, and each has their own weakness. Water coolers, for example, spin manically towards you, and can only be defeated by shooting the water bottle off the top when it stops moving.

Doing this, however, requires the player to target their weapon by holding down the left trigger, shoot the weapon with the right trigger, while moving with the left thumbstick and aiming with the right. Factor in the need to change weapons, as well as additional enemies attacking from all sides, and you’ve got something that’s better suited to far more experienced players.

Somewhat bizarrely, the difficulty settings don’t actually change how hard the game is. The easiest setting gives players ten lives rather than three when playing on “hard”, and also has on-screen prompts to point the player in the right direction, but the combat remains as tough as before. The extra lives, therefore, are simply there to allow kids to progress past tough sections through bloody-minded persistence. What it doesn’t do is address the frustration inherent is such an unbalanced situtation.

There are curious decisions elsewhere as well. It’s a very long game, with levels that run into one another. Since you’re infiltrating the same location from one stage to the next, there’s precious little variety in the environments and it becomes very easy to get muddled about which rooms you’ve already seen.

There are also no multiplayer or co-operative options – just the story mode for a single player – and there’s no option to go back and replay completed sections. This is a particularly silly omission, given that kids love being able to dip back into favourite sections of a game. It also means that the collectable data discs hidden throughout the game are essentially lost for good once you finish a level. Since these upgrade your health and weapons, making your task easier, it’s a baffling oversight.

All of which leaves G-Force in a curious position. If it featured a human secret agent, and was aimed at older children, it would be highly recommended. It’s a very good action game, and it looks lovely. But how many kids of that age want to play a game about talking guinea pigs?

For a film based on a movie aimed at Under 10s, it’s simply too frustrating – there were parts near the end that drove me nuts, with three decades of gaming under my belt. It’s a step forward in production quality for children’s gaming, but it misses the mark as far as accessibility is concerned.