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IGN Review of Winx Club: Quest for the Codex
It's usually a spaceship. Some sleek, high-tech starfighter with upgradeable weapons and shields, blasting off through a set of forced-scroll stages. That's the side-scrolling shooter genre most people know, built on the foundation of series like Gradius, from Konami. In this release, coming from that same major publisher, there's a bit of a change. No laser cannons. No speed boosts or missiles. Just fairies. Lots and lots of fairies.
Winx Club: Quest for the Codex marks the first time the female-focused Winx Club cartoon has come to the DS. It does so as something of a hybrid - the core gameplay here is a take on shooters, but intermixed between the main flying levels are a handful of DS-exclusive mini-games.
The blend is not cohesive. The story of the game finds friends Bloom, Tecna, Stella, Musa and Flora - the five members of the Winx Club - meeting up with a new pal, Layla, and joining her quest to save a group of kidnapped pixies. Flying through various environments and blasting baddies while cutscenes continue this story makes sense. It's the random mini-game stops during the adventure that are confusing.
Out of nowhere any of the girls may choose to announce that she's run out of Winx (magical power) and needs to build some back up. Mystical energies are apparently best harnessed by playing Dance Dance Revolution, or a knock-off of the classic puzzler Pipe Dream (both are the basis of mini-game designs here). Some of these mini-games are solid. Others, not so much.
The former include Dance Floor, Layla's mini-game that emulates DDR with falling arrow icons activated by button presses. The game alternately switches input styles to take advantage of the touch screen, presented the familiar DDR Dance Pad layout on the screen and encouraging you to "dance with your fingers." Musa, the rhythm-themed Winx girl, has a similar mini-game - Rhythm Jam. This one uses the stylus to select and play an array of instruments. And solid too is Tecna-Logic, the Pipe Dream clone that tasks you to complete a circuit pathway before an electrical charge reaches the end of the line.
Quest for the Codex's other three mini-games are forgettable, though. Flora's Enchanted Garden is a slow-paced blaster, simply tapping bugs in a garden to keep them from eating a growing vine. Stella's Solar Power is a functionally broken ball-bouncing design where you use the stylus to draw lines and keep a spinning sun in play - if the touch screen registers your input, that is. And lastly, Bloom's Dragon Flight. It simply knocks off the flying mechanic of the main shooter levels, as Bloom pursues her own shadow for an incomprehensible purpose.
The mini-games on offer here aren't much of a selling point overall, which is why it's good that there's a larger, more engaging design in place. The primary side-scrolling shooter levels leave a lot to be desired themselves, though. The level design employed is weak. Enemies appear rarely, and present little challenge when they do arrive. One innovative idea is here, and that's the ability to switch between the different Winx girls at will by touching their portraits on the lower screen. Each one has her own unique ability, from Flora's constricting vines to Layla's blasts of water. It's a concept that could have been expanded upon - I can imagine how engaging a Gradius title might be with the power to switch quickly back and forth between entirely different spaceships.
The Winx Club brand comes through in some animated clips from the TV show that play out across both DS screens, giving the title's presentation a boost - but in-game, the graphics are woeful. The girls are rendered poorly, as is the world around them. The best graphical elements in the game come through in the included Fashion Editor, where you can dress up each Winx in different outfits and even design patterns for their clothing in Animal Crossing style. But this mode just doesn't mesh with the mess found in the action stages.
©2006-11-22, IGN Entertainment, Inc. All Rights Reserved
Winx Club: Quest for the Codex marks the first time the female-focused Winx Club cartoon has come to the DS. It does so as something of a hybrid - the core gameplay here is a take on shooters, but intermixed between the main flying levels are a handful of DS-exclusive mini-games.
The blend is not cohesive. The story of the game finds friends Bloom, Tecna, Stella, Musa and Flora - the five members of the Winx Club - meeting up with a new pal, Layla, and joining her quest to save a group of kidnapped pixies. Flying through various environments and blasting baddies while cutscenes continue this story makes sense. It's the random mini-game stops during the adventure that are confusing.
Out of nowhere any of the girls may choose to announce that she's run out of Winx (magical power) and needs to build some back up. Mystical energies are apparently best harnessed by playing Dance Dance Revolution, or a knock-off of the classic puzzler Pipe Dream (both are the basis of mini-game designs here). Some of these mini-games are solid. Others, not so much.
The former include Dance Floor, Layla's mini-game that emulates DDR with falling arrow icons activated by button presses. The game alternately switches input styles to take advantage of the touch screen, presented the familiar DDR Dance Pad layout on the screen and encouraging you to "dance with your fingers." Musa, the rhythm-themed Winx girl, has a similar mini-game - Rhythm Jam. This one uses the stylus to select and play an array of instruments. And solid too is Tecna-Logic, the Pipe Dream clone that tasks you to complete a circuit pathway before an electrical charge reaches the end of the line.
Quest for the Codex's other three mini-games are forgettable, though. Flora's Enchanted Garden is a slow-paced blaster, simply tapping bugs in a garden to keep them from eating a growing vine. Stella's Solar Power is a functionally broken ball-bouncing design where you use the stylus to draw lines and keep a spinning sun in play - if the touch screen registers your input, that is. And lastly, Bloom's Dragon Flight. It simply knocks off the flying mechanic of the main shooter levels, as Bloom pursues her own shadow for an incomprehensible purpose.
The mini-games on offer here aren't much of a selling point overall, which is why it's good that there's a larger, more engaging design in place. The primary side-scrolling shooter levels leave a lot to be desired themselves, though. The level design employed is weak. Enemies appear rarely, and present little challenge when they do arrive. One innovative idea is here, and that's the ability to switch between the different Winx girls at will by touching their portraits on the lower screen. Each one has her own unique ability, from Flora's constricting vines to Layla's blasts of water. It's a concept that could have been expanded upon - I can imagine how engaging a Gradius title might be with the power to switch quickly back and forth between entirely different spaceships.
The Winx Club brand comes through in some animated clips from the TV show that play out across both DS screens, giving the title's presentation a boost - but in-game, the graphics are woeful. The girls are rendered poorly, as is the world around them. The best graphical elements in the game come through in the included Fashion Editor, where you can dress up each Winx in different outfits and even design patterns for their clothing in Animal Crossing style. But this mode just doesn't mesh with the mess found in the action stages.
©2006-11-22, IGN Entertainment, Inc. All Rights Reserved