Awwww Shrek, the big lovable goof and his best buddies are once again here to brighten our days with their slap stick humour and thrilling adventures. If you’re thinking; “This guy doesn’t know the first thing about Shrek!”….then you’d be correct. I’ve never seen Shrek and have no desire whatsoever to do so. However, this has no bearing on my illegibility to write a review about this Shrek game. Simply put, this could be called A-Team ’N’ Roll, and it would still be terrible.
Shrek ’N’ Roll is a puzzle and skill game. You’re in control of two characters who stand on opposite ends of a 2D platform. Each end is connected to a winch and your left stick controls the left winch while your right stick controls the right. It’s kinda like a spirit level, only less useful. Positioned in the centre of said platform is a pumpkin (by default) and your simple task is to feed, what I can only assume are, Shrek’s offspring who are hanging out of the portals. To feed them you have to either assent or descent the tower and using balance and leverage physics you can direct the pumpkin into the ‘Ogre’ by sliding it along the platform. If you raise the left side your pumpkin is only naturally going to roll to the right side. Genius......
Holes on the tower prevent you from obliterating this game, one slight wrong movement and you’ve lost your pumpkin and are back to square one. Every level has a set amount of ogre’s to feed and you have to feed them all to move on. There are power-up’s and coins to collect. If I’m not really selling the concept to you, then this review is going according to plan.
I’m not entirely sure who this game is aimed at. I’d guess children and I’m probably correct, but unless you’re under 5 is a championship gamer, don’t expect them to advance further than level 3. This is frustratingly hard, rather than a decent game in this genre would be - fiendishly difficult. Indeed the challenge curve jumps too and from rock hard to a little bit easier than rock hard every other level. There’s no gradual rise and it just seems a little unfair.
If you play for a bit, you do start to improve a little, but by this time I was bored out of my mind. Shrek ’N’ Roll is really very dull. The backdrops change every five or six levels, but the main playing area goes largely unchanged - apart from more holes for your pumpkin to drop through. Even more frustrating is the fact that when you do feed an ogre, you’re reset back at your starting point. So a level where you need to feed 6 ogre’s, turns out to be 6 mini levels. Feed and ogre? OK, lets drop your multiplier back to x1.…even though you haven’t lost or dropped the pumpkin! It completely breaks the flow.
If all of this wasn’t bad enough, you have the most irritating music ever conceived to contend with. A 12 second loop it seems and it never ever lets up. Similarly, the voice overs are potential joypad killers. Shrek and that donkey guy are the least lovable ‘heros’ of all time. They are horrid cretins who repeat the same 2 lines of dialogue again and again……..and yes you’ve guessed it - again!
Visually lazy, I know there’s not an awful lot that can be done, but the lack of effort put in to the character animation, the drab backrounds and the lacklustre tower variants is shocking. Why anyone would even bother with the two player vs. mode and a sleep inducing score attack is a mystery not even Jonathan Creek would attempt to solve. Shrek ‘N’ Roll offers no Xbox LIVE multiplayer - which again stinks of laziness. I can only deduce that the developers don’t want people to enjoy this game. Far too challenging for the younger gamers it’s aimed at and even if they did manage to get a good grasp - they’re not idiots. They will be even less likely to put up with the banal gameplay than any adult.
Shrek ’N’ Roll unfortunately, feels like a cheap cash in and gave me no pleasure whatsoever - it’s not often a game does that.
