I am trying think of a good pun, but I got nothing.
Many of you have probably seen the Pixar movie The Incredibles by now and more than likely enjoyed it. As with any hot property, the licensing of the merchandising rights was swift and ferocious. Enter the GameCube version of The Incredibles.
If you have seen the movie, you know the premise of The Incredibles is a family of superheroes fighting against this dude named Syndrome. There's more to it than that, but I'm not here to summarize the movie. That said, the movie plot and the game's premise are exactly the same, given a few liberties here or there. So the game is essentially about running around doing superhero things.
In case you do not know, Pixar movies sport fantastic computer generated graphic animation. However the games, as you might have already suspected, don't come up to par of the movies. Or other games for that matter. But on the whole, The Incredibles’ visuals do a more than adequate job of conveying the retro-60's silver/golden/what-have-you age of superhero comic books, although I don't think they will be handing out awards for this game's graphics. The flaws that are the most prominent are some muddy textures and very noticeable pop-in on Dash's segment. Other than that, the graphics are OK.
Also on the positive side is the sound production. The music is well composed and has the same retro-60's feel as the graphics. The voice actors deliver their lines clearly, although their one-liners do get repetitive quickly. I was quite surprised Samuel L. Jackson pretty much narrates this game at the start. That’s +1000 culture points, but I'm not sure it really adds anything.
Unfortunately, this is where the praise ends.
The Incredibles attempts to have varied gameplay by giving each family member his or her own segment of the game. The game is broken down as thus:
It looks varied, but the truth paints a different picture. The Mr. and Mrs. Incredible segments are essentially identical, and the Incredi-ball is similar too, although more puzzle oriented. So in reality, this game does not offer much variation. The combat system is tedious with no variation from start to finish except maybe some of them have shields from time to time. Swinging around on things can get irritating considering it is nigh impossible to judge where you are going to land because the camera follows you instead of remaining static to allow a frame of reference. Swinging between multiple moving objects can be described as a crapshoot, and this happens frequently near the end of the game. Also frustrating is that some of these swing-points are over pits in which you will die a great many deaths and frequently it will not be your fault. I got bored quickly in these.
Dash's segment involves you running to the end of a track. It sounds simple, but I swear you need to be psychic to be able to run these. Unless you know what is coming up on the road, you will hit it and have to start that checkpoint segment over. Trial and error. It is a relief that there are checkpoints, otherwise you might be frustrated enough to quit. Violet's segment is completely ill-conceived and boring. You sneak around guards in the jungle. If they see you, they shoot and you die instantly. Don't worry though, you can turn invisible! …for two or three seconds, completely negating its usefulness. What you are left with is running forward and hoping they don't see you and running to a niche to cower in fear as your invisibility slowly recharges. And also hoping that the guards don't somehow see you in your invisibility through some bug, which happened to me a couple of times. When you die, you will have to repeat that segment over. That's right folks. More trial and error. Dash and Violet get together and form the Incredi-ball, in which you roll around and hit bad guys and power conduits. It's pretty fun, but by the time you get to it, I don't think this game and the word "fun" can coexist in the same sentence.
I can recommend this game to fans of the movie. It is not absolute garbage shoved off onto fans for them to buy blindly. They did try to make this game special. But I cannot recommend it to anyone else. It gets tedious, irritating, and boring very quickly. There are a great number of unlockable pieces of concept art, but they really are not worth the effort to get them, and they will probably be on the DVD release anyway.
It is such a shame that with a great license and premise to work with, this game was the end result.
