When Danger Calls, be Incredible!! Or... not very incredible. (The Incredibles When Danger Calls (PC))

Member Name: CaptainD

Product:	The Incredibles When Danger Calls (PC)
Date:	24/03/07 (165 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Fun for younger kiddies... video clips from the film are cool...

Disadvantages: ... extremely repetitive...

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 repetitive sound samples really start to grate on the nerves with that one. The game where you play Dashiell is very annoying as the mouse control really doesn’t work very well at all. 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. It’s all very bright and colourful and thus appealing to young children, who are the primary audience for this game. 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 three difficulty levels, giving it a little extra appeal to older players, 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. For older players like myself it seems a little like a throwback to yesteryear – in the days before computers and games consoles were not powerful enough to scroll the screen with bearable speed, all games were either single-screen or flip-screen, or like this a collection of different single screen games. Admittedly I didn’t get much of a feeling of nostalgia since detailed, colourful graphics, sampled speech and video clips were hardly the norm for video games in the early days.

Compared to “Finding Nemo: Nemo’s Underwater World of Fun”, which I bought at the same time and reviewed recently, The Incredibles is a little better value but in some ways I liked it less. Both made nice presents to young friends though so I’m not too distraught about having bought them – the kiddies who received them don’t need to know that I hope to recoup my money reviewing them, eh? :-D

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)

<b>Tested On:</b>

OS: Windows XP Home Edition SP2
CPU: Pentium 4 2.4GHz
RAM: 768Mb
Graphics card: 256Mb GeForce 5500 FX
DirectX 9.0c

- No technical problems encountered.


I got the game as an impulse purchase from Morrison’s for £3.99, and the best way to get it is probably with Play.com’s 3 for £10 offer. This is strictly for the kiddies though, like the other games in that range.

Summary: If you have a young PIXAR fan in the family, they'll love it