George of the Jungle review

Every now and again we get games we don't necessarily want to review, and George of the Jungle is one of them. The only memory we have of the character is the absolutely atrocious Brendan Fraser movie, though it appears he has since acquired his own cartoon on Nickelodeon. Even if we look past the fact that this is a game for five year olds, we still found George of the Jungle to be a tedious experience.

Words by Adam Gulliver , playing on a Nintendo Wii.

Right from the start, we couldn't help but cringe. A George of the Jungle rap song playing over the title screen made us squirm and what's worse is the irritatingly catchy song persists in our minds even now. George's insistance on speaking in the third person in the opening scene also caused annoyance; only The Rock should be able to get away with that.The 'story' is about George hunting down some research pages which will help cure illnesses as well as help his sick friends Ursula and Magnolia. Cue eleven levels of pure platforming tedium. If our first impressions were bad, what came after made us feel even worse. Jumping makes George somehow float in the air at times and the crucial double jump can sometimes have a tendency to not work, sending you hurtling to your death. Combat is also quite laughable, with just one attack and a simple three button combo at your disposal. It only really becomes a problem during the boss fights, though; often your attacks won't register at all and instead you'll find yourself on the receiving end of a spear.George of the Jungle manages to push all the platforming clich buttons - collectibles, rope swings, the themed levels - it's like playing one of those really bad cartoon licenses from the Mega Drive era. It even manages to fit in some mini-games in between the action; one of which had us riding an elephant to the finishing line, which also reminded us of an old platformer during the 16-bit years (The Lion King, perhaps). Playing this game is like being stuck in a time warp.Not completely ignoring the capabilities of the Wii, a few motion controls have been tacked on. Some work, and some don't. The one that works the best is the simple ground slam. Just do a double jump and move the Wii remote sharply down and you'll crash through broken floorboards. The one that really infuriated us was the charge run. To do this you have to swing the remote in a circle, but so precisely that George will often stop mid charge and start the process again because you didn't make a good enough circle. This brings us onto the other form of motion control, what the game calls 'struggle events'. Often through the game you'll have to have George use his strength to stop parts of the scenery falling on him. Doing this requires you to wave both the nunchuk and remote as fast as you can. We found this hard to do at first because we thought that fast yet small movements would suffice; they weren't, and over and over again we watched George get crushed by a falling pillar. So we soon realised that to get past these parts we needed to act like a five year old child on a sugar rush, shaking our hands around until they almost fell off. Being too old for this sort of thing, we were exhausted and needed to take a quick breather. Maybe this kind of activity would be fun for a kid.We don't want to be too harsh on George of the Jungle, because the game isn't really aimed at us. However, we remember when we were young lads and these types of games were far more enjoyable than what we have here. The 2.5D graphics are quite nice and it captures the character and environment well, but overall we can only really recommend this to parents who want to shut their kids up for five minutes.