Thoughts About Wall-E

We won’t come home until we kiss a girl.

Wall-E, to me as a quasi-serious gamer, is a guilty pleasure. The overly simplistic missions, objectives and control scheme, and light hearted, good natured undertones contained within the game would be enough to turn other “serious gamers” off. Wall-E is by no means an epic. Wall-E will not make anybody top ten list. But Wall-E is very fun.

For those who have seen the movie (and that should be all of you by now, unless you’ve been living a Disney free existence some how. I’m looking at you Southern Baptists…) the game doesn’t really offer anything new in the way of story or character development. I think it would even be fair to say that, unlike some other licensed games that trying to improve on the original, the characters and story are a copy and paste of the movie script. (You’re even shown clips from the movie in between levels. A nice treat.) Not that this is bad for the game. I think that developers knew the movie was so brilliant and decided to leave it enough alone.

Trash compacting and taking names.

In addition to the characters and story, the game plays through the same locations that you’ll see in the movie. From the trash filled planet earth, to the giant human inhabited spaceship, to even a level where you control both Wall-E and Eve floating through space.

The actual make up of the levels is nothing ground breaking. Each level consists of your typical platform game elements. There are enemies for fighting (or avoiding), puzzles for solving and in some levels timers to beat. All standard issue gaming there. What adds a little bit extra into the game are the mini “meta objectives” that are contained within each level.

The first meta game is a platformer’s dream. You get to collect “Buy and Large” tokens! There are ten of these in each level. Some of them are out in the open, so are a little tricky to find. Collecting all unlocks some bonus information about the movie as well as some low hanging Xbox achievements.

In addition to collection the tokens, each level also houses a puzzle that when correctly solved let’s Wall-E collect dolls of characters from other Disney/Pixar films. The puzzles aren’t overly simplistic to solve either. They were just hard enough to make me feel clever without frustration me.

It can’t all be lovable robots and starships.

There really isn’t too much that was wrong with Wall-E, but there were some areas I feel could have been better. As I mentioned, the ho-hum level design could have been greatly improved upon. There enemies were mindless and boring. And the game also suffered from a few classic platforming cliche glitches. Enemies running into invisible walls, a camera angle that at any given time would shift the focus off of Wall-E and EVE, and even a couple time the game itself experience some slow down. During the age of Xbox these are nothing that a few more weeks/month of polish couldn’t fix, but hey… Disney has deadlines. I get that.

On top of all that, I found the game very short, though I thoroughly enjoyed the 5 hours (yup, only 5) it took me to play through. As much as I would like to give Wall-E the perfect score (yes it really is that fun) I can’t. The afore mentioned glitches can’t go unnoticed. If this were anything other than Wall-E I would give it a much lower score, but all things being considered I’m going give it solid, highly recommended 7.