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Posted on: Jan 02, 2008
Golden Compass
WORDS BY: Chuck Osborn
What’s not to love about a kids’ game that encourages you to lie? Well, its controls, for one thing. This tie-in to the movie version of The Golden Compass (based on the charming fantasy novel by Philip Pullman) awkwardly retells the film’s plot in a series of 23 levels that manages to bring together Prince of Persia-style acrobatics, interactive cut-scenes, mini-games, logic puzzles, and fighting into a single, uneven game.
Playing mostly as adolescent heroine Lyra, and sometimes as her Ice Bear warrior friend Iorek, your hunt for missing children takes you from Oxford to the far, snow-covered north. Aided by her anthropomorphic soul (a.k.a. daemon), Lyra can glide, climb walls, and dash, and, with her golden compass, divine the future by matching symbols and buttons.
Fun mostly for devotees of the book or movie, the game suffers from touchy controls; an inability to maneuver the camera; and twitch mini-games that encumber more than they enhance. There’s no reason to play The Golden Compass unless the movie or book absolutely monopolizes your imagination.
ON XBOX 360
- Tons of diverse gameplay.
- You get to ride a polar bear. A polar bear!
- Controls need lots of improvement.
- Will the Harry-Potter-is-satanic crowd boycott the game as well as the movie?
