The Golden Compass

December 10,2007 - As the release date for The Golden Compass movie grew near, Christian fanatics riled over the book’s anti-religious tones (the film, in fact, has more anti-fascist tones). These fanatics shouted for a boycott. Well, we here at Gamer 2.0 have another boycott in mind: boycott the damned game. No child, teenager, or adult should step foot near this game. With last gen (perhaps pre-last gen?) graphics, no camera control, terrible gameplay, and overall suck ass factors, The Golden Compass game is hardly worth mentioning.

The game follows the events of the movie but includes more action oriented sequences, races, and so on. You play as Lyra Belacqua and Iorek Bannison, a young girl who is the focus of the story and the ice bear who helps her throughout her journey. After being taken from her school and escaping the grasp of the evil Marisa Coulter, she sets off to find out what has happened to a number of missing children taken up North. Lyra has what is called the Golden Compass, which acts as a truth reader. Asking it any question will provide the truth. The movie is actually pretty decent, but the game takes the premise, smashes its face into the ground, picks it up, gouges its eyes out, and slashes its throat before finally ripping its heart out.

We’ve all come to expect a certain standard when it comes to games adapted from movies, even the pretty bad ones. Some had good mechanics (Spider-Man 3 isn’t too bad), while others had at least half-decent graphics. Golden Compass manages to live up to nothing, for the most part. Combat is simple in the bad sense of the word. As Lyra, you do no actual battle. You run around with your daemon (a Jiminy Cricket, of sorts) doing inane tasks to advance the story. The “combat” is done by moving the character in a certain direction to avoid being hit. Sometimes you’ll have to use your daemon’s powers, but that’s somewhat rare (combat-wise, at least). The only other thing you can do with Lyra is have terrible mid-conversation mini games. You must play them in order to convince the other person that you’re telling the truth. Promoting deception, for shame!

Another mini game you’ll have to encounter is with the Golden Compass itself. There are 36 or so symbols on the Compass and they all have four different meanings. In your journey, you’ll discover meanings for the symbols; other than that, you’re on your own. You are given a word, you choose what you think is the appropriate image, and you must keep the cursor in the middle of the compass and press the corresponding button when prompted. After three tries, you’ll be given the answer to your question. Questions can be asked in the journal you keep.

Controlling Iorek isn’t too much better. You can slash, block, and grab, then slash, block, and grab. Oh, you can also slash, block, and grab. There’s a rage meter to build up as you fight and for just a moment you can put a shock through the ground. Here’s to mediocrity! You can’t control the camera with this beast either. Really, what’s the big deal? Is it that hard to implement it into the damn game? This makes The Simpsons Game look like it had Camera Control of the Year written all over it.

When King Kong released, it was the first multiplatform movie game with a next gen release. For what it was, it looked ok. Golden Compass somehow looks WORSE than it. The character models are disgusting, looking ported from early PlayStation 2 games. Making it worse, they don’t move very well either. The voice acting is ok at best but really ends up just being annoying. The music is almost forgettable, too.

The game also ships with no multiplayer, but that’s one of the few pluses the game has going for itself. It’s somewhat surprising they didn’t try to fit something in there. Fighting as polar bears sounds good to a certain extent, but it’s definitely better to watch than to translate that into a crappy game such as this.

There’s not really much more to say about the game other than just ranting about our horrible experience with it. Surely, that would bore you, our respected readers. We’re actually somewhat sorry that you’re being exposed to this game in the first place. Please, look elsewhere for gaming if you want to do yourselves a favor.

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