Based on the Disney movie of the same name that nobody will watch, you are a special agent gerbil sent to investigate a plant that builds appliances that have suddenly come to life and began attacking their owners. So, rather than send in, say, a SWAT Team or the like, they have a collection of tiny, again, GERBILS who are trained and intelligent enough to undetake the mission at a moment’s notice.
You get to play as one of the agents, Darwin, or his fly sidekick, Mooch. Darwin is the “muscle” of the duo (again, being a, you know, gerbil kinda makes being the “muscle” an exercise in comparative descriptions) and is armed with an electric whip and an array of guns, such as hypno lasers, flame throwers, etc. Mooch is mainly there to serve as your main weapon of choice when dealing with the puzzles in the game, which there are more than a few of, but all seem to fall into the same “send Mooch into the air duct and grab a key card or power supply and bring it back to Darwin” variety. Mooch is given a small beam that stuns equipment momentarily, but outside of the very last level, he is not much of an offensive weapon. Not like, say, the writing which is quite the offensive weapon.
You have to break into the labs of the company that makes the equipment and after that --- paying a nod to the God of reality that this movie clearly worships the altar of --- break into FBI HQ. Nice to know the FBI can successfully and thoroughly be compromised by vermin. I know, it’s Washington and it’s hard to tell the difference between a gerbil and Dennis Kucinich, but that is why they have to wear name badges. The gerbils aren’t wearing any name badges. Why nobody just stomps on them is a question one must wonder. Also, why are gerbils able to handle angry appliances that people seem quite incapable of doing against.
The story of the appliances becoming sentient AND angry does somewhat explain why they have appliances flying about elevator shafts or in all sorts of weird areas (after all, they are sentient --- not smart) but it still reeks of silliness. That you are a gerbil is presented in idiotic detail as some of the puzzles involve you running on a gerbil/hamster wheel to unlock gates or lift doors or what have you. Now, I don’t claim to know how EITHER the FBI or the plants of high-tech appliance firms run their systems, but I’m not really buying into a bevy of wheels for tiny animals to run in (as they really couldn’t conceivably be operated efficiently in any other manner). There is a pretty decent collection of enemies to kill, all with different attack strategies. The tiny CPU chips simply gang up on you and tie energy lines to you to slow you down while bigger enemies take shots at you. Vacuums are nigh invulnerable and will toss back to the entrance of the area if they catch you. Bug zappers are the bane of Mooch’s existence, obviously.
In many ways, the movie and game makes you long for the understated rationalism of the Transformers movies.
The game, to its credit, actually looks nice. I rented it, so I didn’t get to use the 3-D glasses, but I see no reason to expect that the game would be improved in any area by using old-school red/blue 3-D glasses to produce hoky special effects. The actors, I guess, do the voices --- I haven’t, nor will ever, see the movie so I am in poor position to determine if the voice heard is legit or a crap stand-in. We’ll assume their real since it would be REALLY cheap to get stand-ins for such a silly game about a silly movie.
The designers did what they could. It is a bit more challenging than I think a youngster could easily handle, but it doesn’t seem really cheap. There are a few points where you can get irked trying to find one certain gadget, but it’s a rarity. It took me almost 10 hours to beat it on hard (hard isn’t difficult, at all, mind you) so you might get it under 7 or so on the easiest setting. I can’t come close to recommending buying it, but I don’t think a rental is an entirely poor idea.
