Over The Hedge Review (no fat)

Game Description

Along with every movie pumped out by Pixar, Dreamworks and friends, inevitably, a game is bound to spring up very soon. This time, the movie is named Over the Hedge, and the game managed to come out before the movie. From experience, we know games like this follow a certain formula, but that's not necessarily a bad thing, as long as the game turns out to be good.

Over the Hedge Gameplay:

Over the Hedge puts you in control of a team of four wacky characters from the movie with the same name. There's Verne the turtle, RJ the raccoon, Hammy the squirrel and Stella the skunk. Over each of the many levels, you control two of these creatures in an attempt to bash everything you can. There are secondary objectives as well, some of which unlock bonus materials such as movie content.

While the schematics of this game type are getting very old very quickly, one can't really complain about the game, considering it is intended for children. However, lets face it, the game utterly lacks originality, rarely shining through with one or two nice touches.

Besides controlling your character, you can play with one button (but you'll generally use two). While this isn't anything new, or anything cool for that matter, it does tend to make gameplay quite repetitive.

Pretty much all you do (except for the mini-games) is swing whatever object you have in your hand at any object you can find and sometimes fire some projectiles at them. As for the mini-games themselves, they're a bit dull, consisting of wrecking a few golf carts, racing some RC cars and swinging golf balls in order to break stuff.

While the game is by no means bad when it starts out, it wears out in the end, mostly because of the simple concept behind the gameplay (beat everything up). The whole charade ends up being too easy, but that was always to be expected here. However, despite its relative simplicity, a large number of levels add up to about ten hours of gameplay. So what do you get when you add a long playing time with a simple game? The answer is boredom and repetitiveness, and there is plenty to be had of both in Over the Hedge.

Over the Hedge Graphics and Sound

The graphics are rather good, the characters from the movie are quite well represented and the levels are all around nice, albeit a tad monotonous.

The sound is OK, but one has to notice the fact that the film's cast don't make an appearance here, even as the voice actors try their best to emulate their voices; something that's always annoying in a game that follows a movie or TV show, but it was to be expected here as well.

The game is ultimately entertaining. Even though it's not fantastic you'll have something to do, and without something way better to do you'll probably invest the time in finishing it. And of course, considering it's geared towards children, it's even better.

Over the Hedge Multiplayer:

The game offers a two-player mode, and interestingly adds an AI controlled companion when no other player is present. The good thing though is that you can switch between the AI and a human companion at any time. While there are a few nice things about multiplayer, like being able to sit on each other and so on, but there are no missions that can't be completed without cooperation, which in the end does limit the multiplayer fun that could have been had with cooperative gameplay.

Over the Hedge 2cent

Over the Hedge is by no means spectacular but it ensures a pleasant gaming experience for the audience it is aimed at; kids. What's a bit more frightening though is that you can see this game's formula from miles away, but that still doesn't make it a repetition of similar titles.

Activision has become very good at producing these kinds of games very fast with adequate quality, but it's a sad thing to see yet another example of "gaming as an industry" in action.

Over the Hedge Pricing

The game is currently available for the price of $19.99