The Golden Compass: Review

Ah, a movie game. How we love to hate them. And this one pretty much deserves all the ire you can spare for it.

This game follows the plot of the movie through the eyes of a 12 year old adept girl named Lyra (LIE-ra) and a talking armored bear named Iorek (YOR-ekk.)

I can already hear you groaning.

Lyra, like all people in the world of the Golden Compass, has a dæmon, a sort of spiritual animal familiar. Lyra's life force is somehow tied to the creature, in that if it dies, she will die and vice-versa. This particular dæmon can take on the form of an ermine, a sloth, an eagle or a wildcat. Each of these dæmon forms assist Lyra in various ways throughout her journey. For example, the ermine is able to detect secrets and plot points. No, really, he detects plot points. (Pause for derisive smirk.) The sloth can be used to negotiate horizontal poles by swinging from them. The eagle can glide short distances while carrying Lyra and the wildcat can climb certain types of walls while Lyra hangs onto its back.

As weird and specialized as the dæmon concept is in this game, it is used and required throughout for almost all of the platforming action in the game. Unfortunately, the interface for all of these actions is horribly flawed. For example, the sloth will often miss a horizontal bar that you have jumped for, even though it looks like you performed the move correctly on screen.

Even worse, many puzzles require that you change characters while jumping or soaring. But the layout of the commands makes this unnecessarily tricky. For example: you could be soaring toward a horizontal bar with the eagle, which requires you to hold the X button while pushing the left thumbstick toward the bar. To grab the bar, you must change to the sloth using the D-pad -- yes, the D-pad which is normally activated by your left thumb -- only you left thumb is trying to keep the eagle moving toward the bar. Oh, and once you make the switch, you need to quickly let go of the X button and then tap it, not hold it. All of this while hoping you haven't drifted too close to the horizontal bar, because the sloth can't grab a bar that it is too close to. I could go on about the errors in this game mechanic, but you get the idea. It reeks.

The voicework between the familiar, nicknamed Pan, and Lyra can be very confusing, because, although Lyra is a girl and Pan has a little boys voice, their voices are very similar, as is their delivery. Especially in the beginning of the game, it seems like Lyra is carrying on a conversation with herself. It takes a while to tune your ear to distinguish between them.

Lyra has a couple of other talents: one of which is that she lies to adults. (Yes, you read that right -- a children's game that encourages lying to adults in almost every conversation.) The "Deception Game", as it is called in TGC, involves playing a number of inane, random mini-games to determine how successful Lyra's lies will be. The minigames are things like: avoid the red dots, get the gold dot past the moving red bricks, smash the red dots when they turn green -- you get the idea. It's simply abysmal.

Lyra's other skill is soothsaying by interpreting the motions of a clockwork device inscribed with 36 symbols, called an Alethiometer. Each of the symbols can have one of three different meanings -- meanings which you are to discover using your ermine familiar. Throughout the game, you will be presented with questions that you can attempt to answer with your alethiometer. There is a worthless minigame here that is very easy if you know all three symbols representing your question, but gets progressively more difficult if you are missing one or two symbols. The answers to the questions are sometimes required to progress the story, but are more often a feeble way of providing exposition -- and much of that is information you either didn't need or already knew if you've been paying attention to the storyline.

Occasionally, Lyra will get into a scrape where she has to play a sort of dodging game with her opponent. In other words, a D-pad direction will show up on the screen and you have to press it. If done successfully, the opponent will miss you and hurt themselves on the scenery. Yeah, I've already said enough. *Sigh*

Iorek is a fighter character. He can guard with the A button, attack with up to a three hit combo using the X button if standing still, rush an opponent or breakable object with the X button while moving, pick up an opponent using A+X and occasionally perform a special attack using Y. If you smash enough objects or enemies, you will charge up a power attack with the B button that pretty much just knocks everyone down. That's it. When you play Iorek you are pretty much just mashing the X button. There's no real depth of play here. And to make things worse, if you are moving the character even slightly when you press X, it counts as a rush instead of a hit, which can get really annoying when all you are trying to do is make the bear face his opponent.

Given the above, is there any reason to play this game? Not really. If you've seen the movie or read the book, then there's nothing new here in terms of story. If you just want some easy Gamerscore, you can get about 700 or so playing through the story for a very frustrating, eight to twelve hours. (The additional points will require a LOT of cursoring over the environment on every level using the ermine dæmon's ability and the completion of a secret challenge on each level.)

So, if you really want to play through the story because you don't get out much and don't want to be seen entering the theater to watch an arguably blasphemous children's flick, then take your licks and rent this sucker. The story is interesting enough to suffer a single play through if you are that desperate to go through it. Otherwise, leave this one behind.

This one gets 2 rotten cabbages out of 10. Yeah, it stinks.