Critic & User Reviews
IGN Preview of Chronicles of Narnia: Prince Caspian
For a licensed title based on a big-budget film, The Chonicles of Narnia: The Lion the Witch and the Wardrobe game was received as a welcome surprise when it was released alongside the film in 2005. With its polished look and unusually deep action-adventure gameplay, the first Narnia game helped set a new standard for movie tie-ins.
Traveller's Tales, which developed the original game, is now hard at work on the second in the series, The Chronicles of Narnia: Prince Caspian. We sat down with associate producer Oliver Barder at GDC to see how the follow-up is faring.
Like its predecessor, Caspian is an action-adventure game that closely follows the film it's based on, but it also departs from the previous title in a few important ways. First, Caspian does away with some elements of the complex combo attack system employed in LWW and eliminates the process of purchasing advanced moves through coin collection.
Traveller's Tales has simplified that process, limiting characters to two basic attacks (light and heavy), which are mapped to the controller's face buttons, and a special ability. Whereas the first game was linear, Caspian is built on a hub system that allows players to tackle game objectives in a looser order.
In LWW, you could control multiple characters during battles, switching between them at will and using them to team up for attacks, sometimes whimsical, and sometimes straightforward. Traveller's Tales has scaled back the whimsy factor in Caspian's combat and limited character control to two players in most cases. You'll still be able to switch between them during combat with the simple press of a button and each character's attack sequence is dynamically generated, which gives a fluid look to the characters' movements.
Caspian will also have local-only co-op play, a choice Barder said Traveller's Tales made to keep the game accessible to players who may be too young for Xbox Live.
We saw Caspian running on an Xbox 360, and Barder showed us several chaotic battle sequences in which dozens of Telmarine swarmed on screen as the Pevensies and Narnians jumped into the fray. There are between 15 and 20 playable characters in Caspian, and the first chapter contains content new to the Narnia universe that's not seen in the books or films.
In the Caspian film and novel, the eponymous prince uses Susan Pevensie's magical horn to recall the four Pevensies to help fight King Miraz, but Barder said gaps between the two stories made it difficult to begin the Caspian game where the LWW game left off. So Traveller's Tales want to the C.S. Lewis estate and asked their permission to fill in the blanks with the game. The result is a new addition to the Narnia story that explains how Narnia fell between the first and second book and how Prince Caspian came by Susan's magical horn.
Speaking of Miraz, Barder showed us in-game overhead views of the king's massive castle, and it looked quite impressive. The Miraz Castle model used in the game is the same one created by WETA for the film, Barder said.
We've still only seen small snippets of the game (it's set for release in mid-May), but what Traveller's Tales has shown so far looks smooth and well-polished.
©2008-02-19, IGN Entertainment, Inc. All Rights Reserved
Traveller's Tales, which developed the original game, is now hard at work on the second in the series, The Chronicles of Narnia: Prince Caspian. We sat down with associate producer Oliver Barder at GDC to see how the follow-up is faring.
Like its predecessor, Caspian is an action-adventure game that closely follows the film it's based on, but it also departs from the previous title in a few important ways. First, Caspian does away with some elements of the complex combo attack system employed in LWW and eliminates the process of purchasing advanced moves through coin collection.
Traveller's Tales has simplified that process, limiting characters to two basic attacks (light and heavy), which are mapped to the controller's face buttons, and a special ability. Whereas the first game was linear, Caspian is built on a hub system that allows players to tackle game objectives in a looser order.
In LWW, you could control multiple characters during battles, switching between them at will and using them to team up for attacks, sometimes whimsical, and sometimes straightforward. Traveller's Tales has scaled back the whimsy factor in Caspian's combat and limited character control to two players in most cases. You'll still be able to switch between them during combat with the simple press of a button and each character's attack sequence is dynamically generated, which gives a fluid look to the characters' movements.
Caspian will also have local-only co-op play, a choice Barder said Traveller's Tales made to keep the game accessible to players who may be too young for Xbox Live.
We saw Caspian running on an Xbox 360, and Barder showed us several chaotic battle sequences in which dozens of Telmarine swarmed on screen as the Pevensies and Narnians jumped into the fray. There are between 15 and 20 playable characters in Caspian, and the first chapter contains content new to the Narnia universe that's not seen in the books or films.
In the Caspian film and novel, the eponymous prince uses Susan Pevensie's magical horn to recall the four Pevensies to help fight King Miraz, but Barder said gaps between the two stories made it difficult to begin the Caspian game where the LWW game left off. So Traveller's Tales want to the C.S. Lewis estate and asked their permission to fill in the blanks with the game. The result is a new addition to the Narnia story that explains how Narnia fell between the first and second book and how Prince Caspian came by Susan's magical horn.
Speaking of Miraz, Barder showed us in-game overhead views of the king's massive castle, and it looked quite impressive. The Miraz Castle model used in the game is the same one created by WETA for the film, Barder said.
We've still only seen small snippets of the game (it's set for release in mid-May), but what Traveller's Tales has shown so far looks smooth and well-polished.
©2008-02-19, IGN Entertainment, Inc. All Rights Reserved