The Spiderwick Chronicles (Wii)

The Spiderwick Chronicles isn’t bad for a game-of-the-movie, but it’s not good for a game.It will not make your inner child throw itself on the ground screaming, or cause your outer adult to turn an even more bitter shade of jade. Indeed, the game manages to relate the movie’s plot effectively, has a brisk pace, and is never particularly odious to play.
Then again, it’s rarely outright fun, since most of the game’s elements (collection, fetch quests, easy action, bad platforming) are the kinds of things you would like to escape from, not to.

The story is the main exception. It’s well represented in various cutscenes pulled from the film and in the in-game conversations. The Spiderwick Chronicles is the story of a family that, after a bitter divorce, has left dad behind and moved into the estate of a crazy, dead uncle who devoted his life to chronicling magical creatures. One of the kids in the family finds his book, and a magical adventure ensues.

Well, it does in the film, anyhow. In the game, a fetch quest ensues, and then another, and another. You’re constantly running about your house and the forest looking for unexciting items like hose nozzles and vinegar. And everything you eventually are asked to fetch can be inspected the first time you see it.One of the first things you fetch is a baseball bat, which you use to kill wicked little critters, gangland style. This beating-things-to-death mechanic, while disturbing, is the best one in the game. It requires only one button, but as you knock the teeth out of your victims, you learn new moves. You only need to hit the attack button, and the new powerful moves just sort of happen once you learn them. The best of these is a golf swing. First, your enemy is launched into the air. From there, you can charge up a mighty swing, as time slows and the enemy falls back down into your strike zone. You then release the button to unleash the bat head, slamming your enemy, who rolls like a ground ball while squirting green blood in all directions before expiring in the dirt and spitting out all his teeth, which you then fetch.
It’s also worth mentioning that while the major gameplay elements are all pretty stale, the game switches between them constantly, so you’re never stuck doing the same thing for long. You won’t have a blast playing The Spiderwick Chronicles, but you won’t be horribly bored, either. There are also a couple of wimpy multiplayer minigames that unlock as you play through the story, though races to capture the most fairies is likely to entertain only the youngest gamers. In fact, this game isn’t likely to entertain anybody for long, because it’s both short and easy.

No matter your age, you will likely think the house looks good, and it should be clear that some very talented artists spent a lot of time making it so. The rest of the game looks average, from the character animations to the enemies to the forest. The sound design, on the other hand, is shockingly bad. Every time you examine an object, your character says something. So if you examine some baggies, your character says “Baggies.” If you examine them again, you get another “Baggies.” If you do it three times in a row, you get “Baggies, baggies, baggies,” which is just crazy. And later, the audio breaks down for a while and the speech gets all garbled, which is just lazy.

The characters in The Spiderwick Chronicles do their best with their wicked bats, fairy nets, mouse-man friends, and cool-looking house, but they’re no match for the entropic forces of fetch quests, bad platforming, and uninspired action. Though the heroes of the movie eventually save their own day from the forces of boredom, they probably won’t be able to save yours.