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IGN Review of Ratatouille
There's a general consensus that Ratatouille is a great, if not excellent, Pixar film. Unfortunately, the same cannot be said for its videogame counterpart, which is a flawed platformer that attempts to tell the story of Remy and his journey to become a great chef. What starts out as a relatively decent game spirals into a parade of glitches and annoyances that really hamper any fun you may have with the title. As far as we can tell, this cheese is too damn moldy.
Developed by Heavy Iron Studios and published by THQ, Ratatouille follows the small rat Remy as he works to become a great chef in Paris. His method: assisting a hopeless cook, Linguini, who clearly has no natural talent in the culinary arts. Simple story aside, this game can be summarized quite easily with a single statement: Ratatouille is a flawed platformer and it's not that fun. For a movie-based game, it certainly isn't the worst, and the mechanical flaws and narrative issues might be overlooked by the younger target audience, but Ratatouille has some major problems to its name. Let's take a look at them.
A poorly told or constructed plot can often be forgiven if the gameplay and other elements come together in a respectable way, but that's tragically not the case here. Essentially, the game plays out across a handful of large areas (large for a rat, anyway), with one area serving as your home base. Each area has a series of missions that, when completed, unlock the next area you can play around in. The problem with this structure is that it's never really explained to you in the game. If you have no prior knowledge going in, the flow of the gameplay is extremely awkward and uncomfortable.
Assuming that you can get into the groove on your own, you'll begin to notice the true problems of the game. Although most of the platforming elements work well enough (as unoriginal as they are), a lot of the jumping mechanics can be immensely frustrating. If you're too close to a solid platform that you need to hop up on, sometimes you can get caught on it and not make the jump. More annoying, really, is how easily and randomly you can die. If you fall far enough, sometimes you'll just instantly be taken to the game over screen without any warning. If an enemy touches you, death can often come even when you have a full health bar, because you can get stuck on them too with no way of backing down.
Ratatouille's sadistic icing on the cake comes in the form of the game's audio. It's awful. During certain missions, you'll receive aural hints from the other characters, but they come so often that their voices will drive you to the brink of insanity. Never have we so desperately wanted to turn off the volume, because that surely improves the overall experience. Furthermore, it doesn't help that the game's music (which is charming, we suppose) is restricted to painfully short and repetitious loops.
©2007-11-05, IGN Entertainment, Inc. All Rights Reserved
Developed by Heavy Iron Studios and published by THQ, Ratatouille follows the small rat Remy as he works to become a great chef in Paris. His method: assisting a hopeless cook, Linguini, who clearly has no natural talent in the culinary arts. Simple story aside, this game can be summarized quite easily with a single statement: Ratatouille is a flawed platformer and it's not that fun. For a movie-based game, it certainly isn't the worst, and the mechanical flaws and narrative issues might be overlooked by the younger target audience, but Ratatouille has some major problems to its name. Let's take a look at them.
A poorly told or constructed plot can often be forgiven if the gameplay and other elements come together in a respectable way, but that's tragically not the case here. Essentially, the game plays out across a handful of large areas (large for a rat, anyway), with one area serving as your home base. Each area has a series of missions that, when completed, unlock the next area you can play around in. The problem with this structure is that it's never really explained to you in the game. If you have no prior knowledge going in, the flow of the gameplay is extremely awkward and uncomfortable.
Assuming that you can get into the groove on your own, you'll begin to notice the true problems of the game. Although most of the platforming elements work well enough (as unoriginal as they are), a lot of the jumping mechanics can be immensely frustrating. If you're too close to a solid platform that you need to hop up on, sometimes you can get caught on it and not make the jump. More annoying, really, is how easily and randomly you can die. If you fall far enough, sometimes you'll just instantly be taken to the game over screen without any warning. If an enemy touches you, death can often come even when you have a full health bar, because you can get stuck on them too with no way of backing down.
Ratatouille's sadistic icing on the cake comes in the form of the game's audio. It's awful. During certain missions, you'll receive aural hints from the other characters, but they come so often that their voices will drive you to the brink of insanity. Never have we so desperately wanted to turn off the volume, because that surely improves the overall experience. Furthermore, it doesn't help that the game's music (which is charming, we suppose) is restricted to painfully short and repetitious loops.
©2007-11-05, IGN Entertainment, Inc. All Rights Reserved