The Chronicles of Narnia: Prince Caspian
The dash of mild spice to the traditional RPG formula.
By Matt Kelly
Prince Caspian plays more or less likely a fairly traditional RPG, which is a departure from the normal 'Hey lets take all the catch phrases from the movie and make a platformer game' approach that most film-to-game adaptions take. You'll be following a pair of plot lines which are told through a combination of in game standard text pop ups and book-like flipping the DS to the side for some more graphical story telling. I'm not all that into the films but my far more hardcore Narnia geek friends have confirmed that while the plot does skip over some scenes from the film, it's more or less intact, and holds together fairly well. While the story probably won't shatter your world (especially if you've seen to the film), it ties everything together pretty well. Even if you haven't seen the film, there's a fair amount of cohesion in the story telling without having to rely on the 'see the film, buy the game' factor.
Gameplay wise, Prince Caspian puts a few twists into the RPG recipe, mainly through it's touch screen quasi real time combat system. While there's no turn phases (does anyone even remember what those are anymore?), characters get to attack and then are temporally left 'recharging' for a few seconds. Combat takes the form of tapping the character from your party that you want to fight with, and tapping the enemy you want to attack. It'll then descend into a brief mini game where you must slash out paths, touch targets, drag things around and a few other things depending on the characters. Success within the time limit and how many times you performed the task correctly determine the damage you inflict on the enemy. There is some basic dice rolling going on in the background but it's all very transparent and even so, the combat system is more focused on the mini games rather than any real statistical dice rolling. Characters do skill up through the forge system however, a kind of stats points system (sort of) which will extend the mini games, making them more difficult with bigger damage results to the enemy. You've also got power attacks which call for characters to team up and do brutal damage. All it up there's a fair bit in the combat and is multilayered enough to keep it interesting, unfortunately though it does have a real issue with difficulty in that, it's just plain not hard enough (perhaps even for the games target audience).
The rest of the game is really a matter of moving from point A to point B and killing everything that gets in your way. Side quests do play a part on one level or another and mainly revolve around getting more characters on board with your team. There are cut off points though with these and if they're not completed by a certain part of the game you lose the chance for good. There are a good deal of characters featured in the game (we count 15) and there's few restrictions on the who you put into your party. Even the all mighty story driving Prince Caspian can be shoved aside out of your party. All characters do gain XP regardless of whether they're in the combat party or not, so you'll never get stuck with a weak party regardless of switching.
The visuals of the game are a mix bag, combat environments are can be very detailed and the attack effects can be pretty swish but the overworld looks like a low detailed prerendered CG environment. Audio wise the music isn't the richest production in the synthesized department, but the tunes are nice enough. Battle sound effects are a bit on the under powerful side.
Summary:
Prince Caspian is a solid enough RPG for first time players. It's got difficulty issues and the overworld freeroaming isn't all that free, but the core of it is solid enough to be entertaining. The game stands pretty well on it's own regardless of whether you get into the films or not, and the plot is more or less comprehensible from end to end.
Gameplay - 7.3
The battle system is decent and has enough in there to keep things interesting.
Graphics - 7.0
A mixed affair of lovely battle scenes and not so lovely roaming environments.
Sound - 6.0
There's a distinct lack of 'umph' right across the board.
Replay - 7.0
Once you're done you're done. An unlockable hard mode would have gone a long way it keeping this one going.
Overall - 7.0
What you've got is a pretty solid film to game package that stands on it's own and does a few neat things. There's something in there for general game players but Narnia fans are going to get the real kicks.
Submitted by Robtot
08/07/2008
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The Chronicles of Narnia: Prince Caspian
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