This game is very standard when it comes its platforming elements, but the presentation is pretty nice for a movie game
Game Play:
So, Spiderwick Chronicles is a combination of platforming and detective work. The game centers around this house and a group of three kids who happen to stumble upon this book from their grandfather or whatever Arthur is since they call him "uncle" at some point and I remember thinking "well, that is kind of impossible seeing as he disappeared 80 years ago, which would mean the kids mother would have to be in her early 60s when she had them and she is portrayed as somewhere in her 30s."
Anyways, the game's platforming is very limited, since jumping and climbing is all automated, which is a curse and a blessing. While it makes things slightly easier for kids, some jumps just happen before you can think and you end up jumping the wrong way and falling down a very deep pit...thankfully, this happens on rare occasion and most times it happens after checkpoints, leading to where redoing these hiccups only bothers you occasionally. The platforming also features some combat elements since you fight all these goblins, which come in three flavors: green grunts, red grunts, and super grunts. The green guys are the easiest of the bunch, taking the shortest amount of time to beat. The red guys take a little longer to defeat, and they sometimes come with armor. The super grunts are 3 times bigger than the grunts and can take a good beating. They feature three combat styles: rock throwing, charging and slashing. The charging is their strongest combo since it not only cuts deep into your characters health, it stuns you for 10 seconds, giving them a chance to charge up for another charge attack. Avoiding these charge attacks are tough at first but easy after two or three tries.
Another element of game play is the detective work, which involves catching fairi- I mean sprites and searching the grounds of the house for materials. The "detective" part comes in searching for the items and remember where you saw these items so you can pick them up when the story calls for it. This becomes easily repetitive as the game requires so much backtracking for these items that you will find yourself looking in the same location 10 times for a different item each time (I never want to go through that tunnel of goblins AGAIN). The catching of sprites is another repetitive element of the game, forcing players to go through a two step program for each new fairy or sprites as the game calls them. First, catching them, which is easy…until some sprites start being a pain to catch, which makes the next step feel like an insult to injury. The second step is to draw the sprite or it will get free. Yes, DRAW the sprite. Luckily this is pretty much a invisible-ink game where you just make the sprite fully appear before the time runs out. This mini-game sounds easy, but is actually the hardest part of the game, since you much have about 95% of the sprite uncovered in less than 30 seconds. The drawings are very close to attention, making them large and with many thin hairs hanging off the sprite, forcing you to uncover all of them. The combining the two steps will frustrate few gamers, but I can only imagine how the kids this game was meant to be played by did with this task.
The game features 4 different characters (the three kids: Simon, Jared, and Mallory and house creature Thumblestick) to play as, each with a different combo system. When it comes to platforming, the kids are virtually the same, only with different animations. However, each kid has different combat. Jared, your starting character, features a baseball bat which is swings mercilessly at the goblins. Jared comes with a slingshot that can shoot ball bearings and rocks. Simon features a make-shift sauce gun that dissolves goblins. He comes with a sauce bomb and the ability to throw gobstones, which are magic stones found in the game. Mallory features a sword and attacks with fencing skills. She is able to disarm opponents. Thumblestick is a small character who features sewing needles to throw at cockroaches and he has the ability to climb many objects quickly. He also comes equipped with a jack to lance onto hooks and swing. Each character's ability seemed to be planned as ways to perform certain puzzles, but this feature never seemed to be exploited as the character swapping only occurs after you beat the game and the game always provides the correct character to play as for each event. This leads to how the game is extremely linear, only going off the beaten path by force with absolutely no side story to any of the extra quests.
Graphics:
For a game based on a movie, the graphics are quite amazing compared to some Xbox 360 titles. The one thing I notice right from the beginning was the hair on the characters. The texturing is quite good, making it seem like natural hair. Many games like to make the very wavy and freaky looking, but this just took normal hair texture and polished it further, giving it a clean look. The goblins and sprites looked great in motion, but the one monster that took a beating was the River Troll, who suffers from a very blocky look. To make it worse, the water effect of the river are not up-to-date, leaving the entire troll event as blocky and motionless. On the other hand, the sprite powers you can use once you capture some sprites are very colorful. Speaking of colorful, the loading screen was probably the best fall screensaver ever created. The leaves fall like leaves in a very breezy day, making me feel calm and relaxed while I wait for the game to load. It is something I wish all games would place as loading screens since they should be made to calm me down after dying or failing at a goal. Besides these notable features, the game features a graphics engine similar to Harry Potter titles, with animations and textures that match those titles. The cut-scenes in the game are a mix of in-game graphics and clips from the movie. The clips are presented in High Definition, allowing the presentation to feel very clear on my nice HDTV.
Sound:
I wonder if the movie features similar music since the game's soundtrack is very engrossing. I especially liked how each song fit the moments of the title. The theme for the river troll makes up for his ugliness, while the main menu theme provides a positive feeling that this game is going to be fun to play. The theme in the house is very cliché to house themes, but the outside theme makes up for it's chunkiness. The sound effect seem to work in tune with the game pretty well, and the voice acting is very nicely done. However, I disliked Simon's voice actor since he was a little to whiny for my taste. On a negative note, I noticed quite a bit of replaying voice work when you played as the house creature, Thumblestick. Overall, the soundtrack is limited but good, and the sound of the game was cheerful.
Overall: 7.5/10.0
While the game did leave a good impression, that impression was short. The game clocks in at about 5-6 hours to get 100% completion in. To make the game last longer, the developers added a multiplayer for up to two players that is fun, but also painfully short-lived thanks to only featuring two game modes and four maps(well, three…one is the same map, but at night). Most gamers will probably be thankful at its shortness since it is an easy game to complete and the achievements are easily accomplishable in a day.
Achievement Tip: In multiplayer, just hook up a second controller to complete the achievements. For the one that requires each player to score 50 points each, just get one character to over 50, then switch controllers and use that character to finish the match. For the 100 points without taking damage, play on the daytime version of the front yard map as Simon. Take both players and position them at the left-side (your left) of the house. Using Simon as the player, continuously use the pump up and spray attack to defeat enemies from behind the toadstool ring. Make sure you keep on this side of the house at all times since two super grunts spawn on the right. However, since you are on left, they will never bother coming after you or throwing stones at you.