Wii U 3DS DS Wii Retro

Wall-E Nintendo DS Nintendo Review

By James Temperton (Mr. T)

1659 Posted on 27.07.2008

Lousy. That's a good word to sum up this game. After a couple of hours of play we made a note: 'boring, we're just walking around picking up blocks and throwing them'. After a few more hours play we were still doing the same thing. The best thing about this game is the noise it makes when you boot it up, the damned cute little robot says 'Wall-E' and we go 'aaaah, how cute'. Then the game makes us fall asleep.

Whilst the film is quite simply brilliant, somewhat inevitably, the game is a pile of trash. For some reason the developers have chosen to make this little DS title a puzzle game. Most...no wait, all of the puzzles, involve chucking blocks of rubbish at switches. This would be okay (boring, but okay) were it not for the infuriating camera that you have to move yourself. For some reason the the camera always seems to face the wrong way, meaning you'll miss switches that you need to press in order to progress. It just seems needlessly clumsy and a little bit tedious.

Screenshot for Wall-E on Nintendo DS - on Nintendo Wii U, 3DS games review

The film follows a wonderful little plot and really makes the life of this fairly unimportant seeming robot utterly captivating. In the game he just picks up trash and throws it at stuff. Whilst the narrative of the film is draped around the game in the form of stylishly animated cartoon cut-scenes, the actual gameplay itself is just a case of throwing blocks. Admittedly it does change locale, so you can throw blocks on Earth and later on in space, but that doesn't really add enough to keep your interest. Chuck in some exciting special bits of trash that explode and disable electronics and stuff and you have enough variety to keep a two year old amused for ten seconds.

Whilst the daft camera is fine in earlier levels, it is almost impossible to work with when enemies are introduced. Some of the puzzles are really clever and take quite a bit of head-scratching to work out, but this involves a lot of camera swivelling. This, surprisingly enough, takes time, something you don't have a whole lot of when you're being attacked by evil folk. As a consequence of this, you'll probably end up dying quite a bit. On each level you have five lives, die five times and you go right back to the start. That would be alright, but most the time you'll die from falling into a hole that the camera angle didn't show properly or getting hit by a laser that you could've sworn was about two feet in front of you.

Gameplay

Some of the puzzles are promising and take a fair bit of working out. Add in some occasionally interesting locations and you have something of promise. Then ruin it all with a terrible camera and don't expand upon the original idea and you have hour upon hour of block throwing. Bad.

Graphics

Graphically it looks like someone took the took a pallet containing browns, yellows and blacks and vomited them onto the page in a haphazard and ugly way. The only saving grace are the mildly stylish cut-scenes.

Sound

It doesn't really make any, which is dull.

Value

The main game doesn't take too long and it is more torture than fun. There's a multiplayer, but that is so terrible you'll lose all your friends and be left crying in a darkened room.

Cubed3 Rating

2/10

Very Bad

About this score

We tried to be nice to this game, we really did, but it just annoyed, spat in our face and then kicked us in our special area until we were crying for mercy. It does have some nice ideas, but it only executes them sort of well and then pisses all over them with terrible gameplay mechanics, a camera that is surely the spawn of Satan and graphics that look like someone excreted them. Avoid.