Go Fall Out Of A Tree, Tarzan (Tarzan (PS))

Member Name: Lemonlurver

Product:	Tarzan (PS)
Date:	30/07/03 (167 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Cute Animals, nice use of film clips

Disadvantages: Phil Collins, pooor gameplay and control, Poor graphics

This platform game by Disney interactive is aimed at those 3+, but as an avid gamer I ?borrowed? it from my younger cousins. I know, stealing from children, I?ll go straight to Hell but it was a game I hadn?t played before. I?m sure I?ll be able to justify it somehow.

The front cover has Tarzan wrestling with a big cheetah, and the booklet has the full instructions with a few more pictures of Tarzan and Jane thrown in for good measure.

The game, as I said is your basic platform. It is a standard 2D game, with a few occasions where you can explore it 3D. You start the game with Tarzan as a young boy and by level 4 he is a fully grown man. It follows the story line of the Disney movie.

Your mission, if you choose to accept it, is to get from point A to point B across 14 levels. Along the way you collect coins. When you get 100 coins you get a new life. You have to shoot/stab/avoid animals posing obstacles to you. To boost your health you can find bananas and berries, which also double up as weapons. You can also collect small puzzle pieces. If you collect all 4 you get a bonus level, where you collect coins that give you lives. Anybody notice a theme here?

One thing you can also collect are the letters that spell Tarzans name. When you finish the game you get additional movie clips to view for the levels were you have collect all the letters. I?ve saved the game on my memory card, just so I can show the clips to my little boy. You get to see clips before every level also, so it ties in well with the film. One problem with the clips is that some would be quite scary for a younger child when taken out of context with the rest of the film. After all, the sight of a forest burning around a multitude of fluffy animals is not very nice.

There are three difficulty settings. With easy and normal you get little hints from Tarzans ape friend, Turk. This, while totally useless for me, is great for kids just starting out on th
e road to PSX addiction. The only thing that makes the levels different is the amount of pain you take when you get hit. You still have the same amount of enemies, and the same amount of health to collect. I played the game on Hard, but it was still far too easy for me.

On 2 of the levels you get to play Jane and Turk. This makes a nice change, although they haven?t spent nearly as much time on the character detail. You would think, being Disney that the animation quality would be good but, with the exception of little fluffy animals, the detail is not good at all. The characters look flat and featureless and the backgrounds are not up to the standard I?m used to. Compared to Hercules (another Disney game) it looks second rate. Even Tarzan, our hero and main focus, looks quite bland. Visually, a total flop.

The game controls are awful. The jump button is unresponsive, and the action button (for stabbing, throwing etc) takes far too long to fire. Now, maybe this is because it is designed for children but my cousins (aged 6 and 9) also complained about this. The camera angles are basic, but in the main acceptable. Only on a few levels were there unhelpful angles, but of course, being mostly 2D it wouldn?t be much of a struggle.

The enemies are non-intelligent. By that I mean that they don?t learn from your behaviour and just follow a set pattern. On the final level the pattern is fairly difficult to pick up, and younger children may get infuriated at the game. Of course, I, the addict that I am I picked up on the patterns fairly quickly so it wasn?t much of a challenge. There are no puzzles at all to solve, except where your collectables are. No brain stimulation at all.

A few aspects of the game I did enjoy were the chases by elephants and gorillas, and also the tree sliding. Swinging off vines was also a nice touch, but spoiled by camera angles. Sometimes I had to take a leap of faith as the scrolling didn?t work very well when sw
inging. The bonus levels were quite interesting as well. The sound was quite nice, with the sounds of the jungle and Tarzans cry of Aaaaah aaaah, aaah, aaaaahhhh! Always good!

For a game created in 2000 I thought it was a great disappointment. Disney seems to have assumed that the main market for it will be children, and that they can foist shoddy graphics and gameplay onto them with no complaint. Well, my cousins and I are complaining. Maybe, at the age of 26 I should have grown out of my Playstation (I?m too poor for the PSX2) but I enjoy it. This game wasn?t an enjoyment. It was too simple in parts and too frustrating in others. There may be some variety in the action but the slowness in loading, the sluggishness of the controls and the basic graphics put me off totally. This was released a year or so after Disneys Hercules which is a far superior game in gameplay, graphics and enjoyment.

But the worst part of the game has to be saving. Our lovely (but bland) heroine Jane comes up with some awful and patronising comments, in an upper class accent. My cousins hated this so much that they would shoot at the screen with a plastic gun! I didn?t quite hate her that much, but by the end of the game I was pretty close. Even the dire warblings of Mr Potatohead aka Phil Collins was preferable to Jane saying "let go to the jungle" in a jolly hocket sticks voice. GAH!

For an adult I would think this game is a total miss. Kids aged 7-11 may appreciate it for a weekend, so I?d hire it out for them instead of buying it. They won?t want to play it again once they have completed it, so it would probably gather dust. You can hire it for £1 per weekend (at most places) or buy it for around £10-£15.

The game took me 2 to 3 hours on hard to finish at 93% complete. I won?t be hurrying back to finish the rest. It uses up 1 space of a memory card and is dual shock compatible.

Summary: