Shrek

I love the first two Shrek films, they're masterpieces that almost make up for the fact that everything else in the franchise is complete crap including this tie in game for the first film. You'd think this game would follow the story or at least feature the same cast, however aside from our titular hero and the mirror of all things, not one recognisable appears in this game.

Of course, the cast of characters is the least of this games problems as just about everything else about this is atrocious. The one positive I'll give it is that it looks really good for an early Xbox game as it incorporates deferred shading which was a technique largely unheard of prior to this games release (for the uninitiated deferred shading is when the lighting in an environment comes from the shadows created by objects/landscapes rather than a developer darkening an area they want for dynamic lighting like they did in ps1 games.) This makes for great looking environments that would no doubt inspire many future titles such as half-life 2 and re4 who uses this technique for more than just show and for actual tension in game, something this game does have but mainly due to shoddy controls and camera angles rather than for what would otherwise be simple puzzles. The game is separated by different maps which while they look decent on a visual level, are otherwise really poorly designed as they seem to be rather laborious which would've been fine except the only way to exit one of these maps without using the pause menu is to complete a challenge that they present you with. You have seven to choose from in each area, although they're all rather basic as you either gave to collect a certain amount if items or knock out enemies (you can't kill in this game for some reason) to have Shrek performing good deeds to progress through the game. There's not much to say about the story as it tasks him with rescuing Fiona by proving to the land he's a good person which doesn't make any sense as Shrek was never a bad person and only messed around with people for his survival because as he puts it "(he's) not the one with a problem, it's the world that seems to have a problem with (him)." Instead, I'll bring up the controls as they're easily the worst aspect if the game, this lumbering ogre can apparently run like he's a triathlete in this game as well as wall jump which would've been a useful skill to have in the film. As you can imagine, this move set is completely unnatural for this character which results in shoddy platforming stages as well as him easily running past items he needs to collect. The collision detection here is also terrible as like most of these games, our hero frequently clips through enemies he's fighting which results in cheap deaths from otherwise trivial fights with weak bosses.

It's a blatant cash grab of a game with one admittedly pioneering feature that prevents it from being a complete farce, as much as the films have become jokes over the years (thanks internet, particularly you channel awesome) they were at least good entertainment at one point which I can't say about this game.