Sega Nerds

Review: The Golden Compass (Xbox 360)

by Chris on December 23rd, 2007

Several years ago, The Chronicles of Riddick: Escape from Butcher Bay proved to everyone that licensed games could be pretty damn good, and in some cases, even better than the product that they’re based on. However, The Golden Compass isn’t one of them.

I’m sure at some point in the planning stages, Shiny Entertainment had a fairly epic game on its hands. However, all that development time ends up being a complete waste as the game it’s shipped is crippled, not only by horrible story telling and pacing, but also by some of the most boring action sequences I’ve experienced in a long, long time.

I’ll be kind and tell you right now, if you’ve never read the book or watched the movie, don’t bother playing this game. No, sir. This game should only be played by the most ludicrous “His Dark Material” fans out there, and to tell you the truth, I’m not sure if there are any of those currently living. But if you have the courage to stay with me, please keep reading.

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If you’re not familiar with The Golden Compass, the story takes place in a parallel universe where people have shape-changing animals called daemons. The daemons, which can talk, share a very strong connection to their human companion and are always the opposite sex. The game revolves around a girl named Lyra Belacqua, who, with her daemon Pantalaimon, is destined to unknowingly save the world from evil.

The game starts off with Lyra and a talking polar bear named Iorek traveling the ice-covered lands of the North in search for her friend Roger, who’s been kidnapped by the Gobblers. It’s in the first few minutes of playing and looking around when you begin to see the chinks in The Golden Compass’ armor.

The ice-covered mountains and glaciers look way too shiny and unrealistic, while the character models appear to be composed of woefully too few polygons. People’s hair in the game either looks plastered on or that they’re wearing shiny plastic helmets, and the animals have somewhat disturbing amounts of stringy fur.

In other portions of the game, textures disappear altogether when interacting with the environment and snowballs and books turn to black smoke when impacting objects. In truth, the game looks extremely close to a first-generation 360 title. All this, mixed with character models that look nothing like their real-life counterparts, only serves to give you a small preview of the problems to come in the game.

The Hamster Ball Syndrome
Gameplay meshes just about every genre known to man and even steals pieces from Atari classics of yore. The bulk of your time will be spent in a traditional third-person style action game with several levels that include platforming. Throughout the game, you’ll take turns controlling Lyra, while using Pan’s ability to transform into other animals, and Iorek. When playing as the polar bear, all that you’re really required to do is mash buttons to obliterate wave upon wave of enemies.

The main course of combat revolves around mashing variations of the directional pad and the X button, while occasionally hitting the B button when Iorek’s Rage Gauge reaches its maximum to unleash an area-effect blast. Sure, Iorek can block, but since he’s so overwhelmingly powerful compared to his enemies, it’s usually just an afterthought.

However, while Iorek’s combat is pretty easy to master, he controls and moves like he’s in a giant hamster ball. Often times, you’ll be charging at an evading enemy and once he passes you by and you try to turn the other way, Iorek continues to run for a second or two before he regains his footing and follows your direction. While this may not sound like too big a deal, it can get particularly frustrating when having to deal with certain bosses who transport around the map, and the whole thing just turns into a cat and mouse chase.

To break up the tedious blood letting, the kind folks at Shiny Entertainment included QTE sequences in the game. However, because this game is pretty much geared to a younger audience, you’ll get quite a long time to decide which button to press. And even when you press the wrong button, it usually gives you another chance without making you do it all over again.

There and Back Again, A Liar’s Holiday
While Iorek’s part in the game is pretty simple and straightforward, the developers rightfully put most of the attention towards Lyra’s levels. When controlling Lyra, you’re usually attempting to reach a far off and ridiculously high object or sneaking past a guard. To make these gameplay portions more interesting, you must use Pan’s ability to transform to get you where you need to go. He can transform into an ermine (basically a ferret), hawk, sloth and some sort of giant cat. Each transformation gives Pan unique abilities like, when in hawk form, allowing Lyra to jump and glide to otherwise unreachable boxes or by using the ermine’s intuition, spot clues to help you advance in the game.

However, these are only mildly fun for the first couple levels before you’re wishing Pan could transform into another animal with new abilities. As it stands, his four transformations just don’t give you very many interesting options.

Although controlling Lyra isn’t nearly as bad as it is Iorek, she tends to be incredibly unlikeable for the sole reason that she lies to nearly everyone in the game. Apparently, she’s also known as Lyra Silvertongue, and I can see why. During most conversations in the game, Lyra will try to get something out of the person she’s conversing with, whether it be items or information.

To do this, a portion of the conversation will take place, and then you’ll be tasked with completing a mini-game to determine how well Lyra responds. The quality of her response will often determine whether you advance in the game. Most of these mini-games, like I said before, basically ripoff of concepts found in Atari games like Frogger and Galaga.

While these mini-games are sometimes a pleasant distraction from the boring platforming levels, in the end, they really only break up any sort of mood or flow that the game has created. It can be pretty frustrating and sometimes downright maddening to not be able to carry on a simple conversation with someone.

The Alethiometer
At this point, I think I missed one crucial piece in the game - the Alethiometer, otherwise known as the Golden Compass. This little gizmo can answer any question Lyra asks it, but there’s a catch. The Alethiometer looks somewhat like a clock, but is made up of four hands, and where the numerals would be found on a clock, there are symbols. Each of these symbols, which range from a horse to an angel, have three meanings.

Throughout Lyra’s adventures, she’ll come across symbol meanings. These can be found using Pan’s ermine intuition skills or by simply collecting a hidden icon. In total, there are 36 symbols with 108 different meanings. Questions will be posed to Lyra and written in her journal. She can then use the Alethiometer to attempt to answer. When trying to do this, you’ll have to turn a hand toward a meaning that you think corresponds to a particular symbol. Now if you’ve already found all of a symbol’s meaning, it’s pretty easy, but if you haven’t you’ll have to guess which one fits best.

After pointing the hands to the three symbol meanings, the fourth hand will begin to spin around, and you must use the left analog stick to try to keep an on-screen cursor in the middle of the Alethiometer when the hand stops. When it stops, you’ll have another QTE part. Depending on how well you matched the three hands with their symbols, this can be very easy or somewhat difficult as the cursor moves more sporadically when you incorrectly match the symbols.

This portion of the game was pretty enjoyable. I enjoyed trying to hunt down the symbol meanings throughout the game and was happy to find out that discovering all of them or answering every question in Lyra’s journal wasn’t completely mandatory. But it’s always there for the completionists out there.

Story? What story?
Now I haven’t talked much about the game’s overall story up until this point. That’s because it’s so bad, I really didn’t want to think about it. Think about it like this, the game is based on a movie, which is based on a book. Inevitably, large portions of the book had to be cut when it was transformed into a movie, but unfortunately and needlessly, even larger and entirely necessary pieces of the movie were chopped from the game.

When advancing the storyline, the game will arbitrarily switch from real scenes from the movie to in-game cutscenes. It must be pretty great for developers of licensed games to be able to rely on someone else’s work to advance the storyline for them. However, because the game does such a bad job at telling the story, the developers had to create some of the cutscenes on their own.

In between levels, huge jumps in the story take place without nary a reason whatsoever. At one point in the later stages of the game while controlling Iorek, I was battling against evil witches astride flying broomsticks. They were giving me some trouble, but I finally defeated their witch queen or whatever she was called. After that level, I had to control Lyra again and help some kids break out of a building. However, in the next level it showed the witches helping me fight another army. It never explained when, how or why the witches decided to help me.

That is only one example of the numerous times this game pulls that crap. But don’t get me even started on what is supposed to be the biggest surprise of all at the end of the movie, which is completely ruined by the game once again pulling crap out of thin air. At some points, I thought to myself that I fell asleep from boredom and missed certain cutscenes or something.

Is there anything really good about that game?
Yeah, I was asking myself that very question, and to be perfectly honest, there’s one piece of The Golden Compass that even outshines some of the very best games on the market - its musical score. It’s written by James Christopherson, who has previously composed music for Surf’s Up and Battle for Middle Earth II. The music is probably one of the only things about the game that would make you believe you’re about to set off on an epic journey.

With soft, elegant sounds, Christopherson easily sets the mood throughout the game, and making it all the more impressive is the fact he had only one month to complete more than 80 minutes worth of music. Unfortunately, Christopherson’s excellent score couldn’t save this game from sinking into the abyss.

Summary
In the end, The Golden Compass is an entirely forgettable experience, bogged down by boring platforming, sluggish controls and blasphemously bad story telling. Even though this game is clearly geared towards the younger crowd, you’d do yourself and your child or younger siblings well by saving the $60 and going to watch the movie or buy the book. If the quality of this game is indicative of what’s to come in future licensed Sega titles, we should all grab some umbrellas, because the shit storm is on its way.

Score: 4/10

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POSTED IN: Chris, Microsoft Xbox 360, Review