Mobile publishers view their market the way their console colleagues did in 1982. Now, as then, the customer is given very little information about a game at the point of purchase. Branding--at least in the eyes of publishers--is therefore the single most important component of a mobile game. Herbie: Fully Loaded features the vehicular movie star, along with the freckled visage of Lindsay Lohan. What it doesn't feature is gameplay, creativity, or audiovisual fidelity.
As Herbie, it's your job to wreck much larger cars, while avoiding taking too much damage yourself. To do this, you must contend with horrible control. For whatever reason--perhaps in an effort to make Herbie more intuitive for nongamers--Disney Mobile decided not to make Herbie's control context-sensitive. To move left, you must press left. This also makes every directional key serve double duty as an acceleration button, which prevents you from driving at anything but top speed.
It's probably just as well, then, that you won't have to do much driving at all, as many of your objectives can be completed by exploiting the game's horrid artificial intelligence. If you cache Herbie away in the corner of one of the game's cordoned-off destruction rings, the bots will be unable to find him. Instead, they'll simply destroy one another.
At no point do you get to steal the show at a NASCAR race track, or cozy up to young and fresh Volkswagon bug models. The most exciting thing you can expect is to pick up a power-up, which might repair your car, give you a speed boost, or freeze opposing vehicles for a short period.
Herbie is hardly a technological showcase for the Sony Ericsson S710. The vehicle sprites are tiny, and are shown through an overhead perspective in one of several nigh-identical rings. The game's frame rate is consistent, but you'll never be imparted with a real sense of speed or danger. Herbie's sound is as forgettable as the rest of the game and isn't worth enabling.
Herbie: Fully Loaded is nothing more than a hastily delivered cash-in on the popularity of a summer film. It is a piece of adverware, for which you will be charged several dollars a month. When staring at a list of names on a carrier's download deck, it's tempting to go for a familiar brand. Resist the urge here.
