Coraline: The Game doesn't seem to bother with the film's dazzlingly unique and dark imagery, and instead, bores you.
The plot of Coraline follows the adventures of a young girl named: Coraline Jones. Her and her mum and dad have just moved into an apartment named: Pink Palace hotel. With her parents constantly busy with their gardening books, Coraline Jones is naturally neglected and bored. Coraline begins to explore around the house in hopes of seeing something that will capture her interest. Coraline sees a small door, and enters the Other World. There, Coraline meets her Other Mother and Other Father who seem like the polar opposite of her real parents. The other mother and other father listen to her, and pay her constant love and attention. Coraline is then forced to replace her eyes with black buttons like her other parents, and Coraline immediately senses there is something wrong. Coraline has to play a series of games with the Other Mother, in order to save her real parents herself and to finally close the door on the Other World.
The plot of Coraline both in the book and the film, is a gloriously dark, imagintive thrillride that digs deeply into fears of a young girl. The story also looks at how children can overcome fears, and how even seemingly sancutary is the real hell. Instead, the game does none of the sort. The game presents Gaiman's wonderfully creepy plot through some lazily animated, sluggish in-game cinemas, and uses still images from the movie to mark the dramatic points of the story, that almost seem like obvious coputs. Coraline: The Game lacks the huge amount of imagination of personality and imagination that made the Coraline narrative so engaging, and, more importantly lacks any care in the storytelling itself.
The gameplay of Coraline: The Game involves Coraline visiting certain areas from the film such as the barn, inside the house and other areas. She is often obtained tasks to fetch certain items for the other characters, and solve an occasional puzzle in order to recieve the items. There are some Wii-remote waggle sections put in, such as walking along the pole in the barn, but are just so darn annoying, they are considerably only there as filler.
The core gameplay of Coraline: The Game is sorely lacking on the creativity factor. The game requires too much fetching, and not enough action. Coraline herself, moves as slow as a turtle in order to get to some locations. Coraline's biggest problem is that the game has nothing intresting for you to do, and instead, give you missions that bare very little relevance to the actual story such as: for some reason... catching as many pancakes as you can with the Other Mother. Coraline just seems to have a horribly unbalanced game structure, as there are too many missions of filler, and very few that are productive. The puzzles are really, the only commendable part of the gameplay. The puzzles are at least neatly laid out, and help you gain to some much needed areas. Other than that, Coraline: The Game is short on anything intresting, and most importantly, short on entertainment.
The presentation of Coraline is a mixed bag. The game itself, hugely lacking in personality and colour, but at least, look like admirable replicas from the areas from the film. The graphics sorely lack detail and attention, and the characters look serviceable, but poorly animated and sadly hammed down. The saddest thing about Coraline: The Game is the consistently strong audio quality. The level music, whilst lacking the quirky, spooky charm of Bruno Coalis's score, is dark and brooding, and an extremely fitting compotent to the mood of the story. The voiceacting, which some voice actors such as Dakota Fanning reprising her role as Coraline herself from the film, and some replacement voiceactors, regardless of which, every actor does a very good job at hitting each character at the right emotions.
To conclude, Coraline: The Game wastes a perfectly good adventure on a lazy budget movie-based game. From the simplistic lazy presentation, to the bland, dull gameplay, Coraline: The Game suffers from an overall lack of effort. I can't say I'm surprised, but I can really say I am very dissapointed in you: D3 Publisher.