captaind's Full Review: The Incredibles: When Danger Calls for Windows, Ma...
The Incredibles: When Danger Calls is a movie tie-in with much the same philosophy as the Finding Nemo game I recently reviewed – give you a slick interface based on the movie and throw in several mini-games related to scenes in the movie. And… that’s it. With two great movies such as Finding Nemo and The Incredibles they could really have made a couple of great games, but we just have these very lazy, uninspiring titles.
(The PC and Mac versions of this game are on the same disc, but since I don’t have a Mac, naturally enough I’m only reviewing the Windows version. I don’t suppose the Mac game is markedly different.)
In all fairness they did make a bit more effort with this one. Instead of seven mini-games you have ten, with a proportion increase in the number of movie clips (20 in total). With each of the four in the Incredible family – Bob Parr / Mr Incredible, Helen Parr / Mrs Incredible (duh), Dashiell Parr / “Dash” and Violet Parr / “Invisible Girl”, you have a “normal life” game. When you complete the normal game it unlocks a new game where you play the same character with their superpowers. All the games are simple and most take place on a single screen – for instance, in Violet’s bedroom as you position force fields to stop your annoying brother from nicking your stuff. The simplest game of all is when you play Bob, doing a bit of weight training – by lifting up trains! All you’re required to do here is hit the space bar at the right time. Thrilling. The game where you play Dashiell is very annoying as the mouse control really doesn’t work too well. On the whole, the games where you have your superpowers are much better, though still very repetitive.
The graphics are good, with fairly basic character models but some lovely backgrounds. The voice acting that there is works okay, and much of it is taken from the movie. Again the use of sound-bites is maddeningly repetitive. There are two other games that can be unlocked apart from those above, one where you control Mr Incredible’s buddy “Frozone” to use hiss powers fighting fire, and one where you have to press the right key at the right time (as you do in dance games… well, that is if you are pressing keys rather than dancing on arrows on the floor…) to stay alive against the huge robot from the end of the film. Guiding you through the game and assessing your performance is your very eccentric and probably mad costume designer, Edna "E" Mode - funny at first but annoying after a while.
Saving the game from a two-star rating is the fact that there are at least three difficulty levels, and some extras – mainly screensavers. There are also some colouring in sheets you can print off, again showing how much this release is geared to young children. Again, my rating might seem a little unfair with this in mind, but the movie was for adults and children, so why should the game only be for children?
The presentation is superb but the games themselves just aren’t that much fun to play, and get very repetitive. Unfortunately this isn’t a game I can really recommend, though again younger players will enjoy it a lot more than I did. Much younger… if they’re under ten, there’s a good chance they’ll like it.
System Specs
OS: Windows 98/Me/2000/XP/x64
CPU: Pentium 2 266MHz or above
HDD space: 330Mb
Memory: 128Mb or more
Graphics card: any 8Mb 3D card compatible with DirectX 9.0
Age rating: 3+ (my guess is it's most suitable for 4-8 year old's, give or take a year maybe)
Features a collection of fun mini-games and activities for children of all ages which captures all the excitement, humour and unique graphical style o...More at eBay
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