Wall-E is a film about a little robot that looks like the one out of Short Circuit. He's not some prototype military bot, mind you, but has the rather more unassuming profession of trash compacting. That doesn't stop our hero being involved in a sprawling adventure with another robot from outer space called Eve.

In this 3D action game, Wall-E must trundle and jump his way through a world filled with trash. His special ability is compacting this junk into different types of cubes which are used to solve various puzzles. Eve is a flying bot who follows Wall-E around, blasting things with her laser when required, and on some levels you play her exclusively. These sections usually involve races against the clock through twisting and turning tunnels.

Unfortunately the game is best defined by two words: repetitive and trivial. The races with Eve give you such plentiful time limits that it isn't unusual to finish in half the time needed, and whether you hit any obstacles on the course or not doesn't really matter. Similarly, many of the puzzles Wall-E has to overcome are way too easy. Often they're made more "difficult" simply by forcing the player to perform a set of tasks over and over again.

For instance, there isn't just one lever to flip, guarded by a single hostile robot which must be dispatched with an explosive energy cube, but four of them in a row, plus a whole load of pointless electric shields that need to be destroyed. This means you have to make lots of long journeys back and forth to pick up the necessary cubes from the trash dispensing machine. Many of the puzzles run along such annoyingly repetitive lines, and they're formulaic in their design.

The enemy guard robots are badly implemented too. They're at least a slight challenge close up, since even given the game's generous auto-aiming it can be somewhat tricky to dodge their point-blank laser blasts when there's a swarm of the things. However, once you figure out that you can manually aim with the first person view and take them all out at a safe distance without them reacting, they become dead easy. The balance of many gameplay issues is just completely off.

Lest we completely trash Wall-E, it's fair to say that the game's easiness might appeal to much younger kids, as will the sound and music which do a decent job of capturing the atmosphere of the movie. There are also some multiplayer offerings alongside the main campaign, but these are mostly rather unexciting variations of straight deathmatch.

Verdict
Wall-E is poorly designed and overly easy, although there may be a little mileage here for younger fans of the film.

Company: THQ

Tags: puzzle robot rubiks cube wall-e cube swinburne university of technology games video games