captaind's Full Review: Ratatouille for Nintendo Wii
Ratatouille for the Nintendo WII is the official game of the popular PIXAR movie. You play Remy, the only rat in Paris with culinary sophistication, on his journey to save Gusteau's, a famous restaurant for which disaster has struck - the food critics have knocked its rating down to 4 stars. Roughly following the plot of the movie, you start off in an old cottage owned by a fearsome old woman with an even more fearsome shotgun and, via the sewers, end up in Paris.
The main game is typical 3D platformer fare, and while it's put together reasonably well and has some decent features (little umbrellas allow you to safely get down from high places, tricky to reach heights often have spools of cotton for you to throw down enabling a quick return to these heights without having to go the long way round, etc), but it's nothing new and gets a little tedious in places. There are lots of mini-games at various stages though such as choosing the right ingredients to make a dish, shooting supplies with a pea-shooter (why this works instead of simply picking them up I'm not sure, but using the Wiimote as a light gun is always a good feature!), setting power and accuracy gauges to pull open a door... there are quite a nice number of different mini-games and some good use is made of the WII's controllers. There are also tunnels to be negotiated - this is easily the best part of the game, quite challenging but a lot of fun. The in-game graphics are perhaps at their best here - you get a great feeling of speed as you rush down the tunnels.
For completing missions you will earn points, which can later be spent at the shop - more on that later. There are also a couple of sub-missions for each level; collecting stars (100 on each level) and a particular object, which will give you an upgrade for your rat colony. This adds a little interest to the game, and I'm convinced only the extremely determined will manage to collect all 100 stars the first time they go through a level.
The graphics on the whole are okay - the textures used and character graphics are rather on the simple side and the animation isn't all that great - the visuals get the job done but that's about it. In the movie clips the graphics look a lot better - sort of like watching the actual movie on a low-quality TV screen - and in these videos the background graphics are rather nicely rendered. As far as the sound goes, the voice acting is mainly pretty good, though Emile's voice always tend to sound muffled. Emile is Remy's brother incidentally, and shows you round the tutorial level as well as being a key character in the rest of the game. Unfortunately the dialogue is very rarely funny - I feel that better humour in-game is something that would have added significantly to the gaming experience - and the music, though very nice and very Parisian, gets extremely repetitive.
On the whole it's the repetitive nature of the game that loses it marks on the whole, even though as mentioned there are quite a number of different sub-games to break things up. The main game has some nice touches but was pretty lacklustre. The unlockables were pretty good though - there's a selection of game modes, single-player and multi-player mini-games, secrets (cheat modes), movie clips and concept art. The single-player mini games are basically those found within the game but played against the clock. There's even a "World Championship" mode for the cooking games where you can upload your scores and compare them to the best in the world. While you have three difficulty levels to begin with -Easy, Medium and Hard - you can buy Very Easy and Very Hard game modes.
The multi-player games are quite interesting, if sometimes a little puzzling. One slight difficulty is that all the action takes place one a single, non-scrolling screen, and seeing your tiny characters in some of the games can be a little difficult. Still the multi-player games were definitely a fun addition to Ratatouille - though I think the game would have been much more fun overall if you could have played the main story mode with two players. Considering the game type it shouldn't have been difficult to incorporate this option.
Final Verdict
For younger fans of Ratatouille, this game will provide a decent amount of entertainment. It's unlikely to take very long to complete, but the extra features you can unlock add some playing time. As with so many WII games it seems more logical to rent this that actually buy it. There are quite a few things to like about this game including some imaginative use of the controllers; but since the main game itself lacks imagination and being fairly repetitive, I'm only going to give it 3 stars. I'm sure you'll enjoy it for a while... just not very long.
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