Hannah Monatana: The Movie Game – Review
July 11, 2009 by
Filed under Blog, Playstation, Review, Wii, XBox
Call it ignorance of showbiz media or the lack of enthusiasm and interest for pop music, but the name Hannah Montana was only revealed to me recently when I heard of how her game would significantly boost my dwindling trophy collection. When the game arrived through my door, I greeted it with open arms in the hope for something to entice me away from the onslaught of third person shooters I’m currently working my way through.
Thankfully not a bullet casing or bald protagonist is in sight but instead a teenage pop star born and bred from the “Deep South” lunges onto the main menu encompassing bright colours, cheesy grins and what can only be described as a gear-grinding attempt at a “catchy tune”. A little investigation later, and I find the title for the song is ‘Best of Both Worlds’. Make of it what you will, but for a self confessed indie music fiend, it’s not exactly my cup of tea. If however, your head is bopping up and down and that left foot of yours is tapping away, then you’ll be pleasantly pleased to hear the songs only get – “better”.
As expected by the title of the game, the main focus throughout is music. The way it’s been approached in this game isn’t to include microphone support (which I was really quite surprised by) but instead you take stage and get involved with a selection of performance tasks like; dancing, crowd actions and taking control of the musical instruments; guitar, keyboard and drums. I’ll admit, at first the general concept of this threw me off balance and despite manic attempts to get something classed as a half-decent score, I was hindered thanks to some of the worst incorporation of six-axis seen in a PlayStation3 game to date and my attempts were short lived then quickly summed up to nothing more than annoyance.
Allow me to picture the scene. You’re the infamous Hannah, stood centre stage in front of a huge crowd (of poorly detailed 2D sprites) ready to perform your heart out. It starts of simple with a few postures locked to the analogue sticks which are then followed up by a manic dash around the stage where you begin to ‘wow’ the crowd with different mimic actions like drum roll or finger-waving. Actions like these are split between analogue control and the limp-wrist creating six-axis where the words ‘precise’ and ‘controls’ have never been further apart. It’s nothing more than a case of waving your control pad around as though you were hailing a taxi whilst in a massive hurry – like trying to escape this God awful game.
The musical instruments are all ‘blessed’ with some defect apart from the guitar which was fairly easy to jam with – more so considering it has three strings. The keyboard is a challenge of tilting the controller from left to right in the hope you hit a few of the cascading notes whilst drums are a mad dash with the analogue stick. The actions aren’t particularly hard but the sounds they create are completely out of place with the backing music…and to think, I thought the music couldn’t get any worse.
Aside from the fun of prancing on the variety of stages, you are able to take foot in a small selection of locales where you’ll make haste with the bland and sterile story as well as have some fun with the included mini-games. ‘The Fairground’ has a few stalls such as ‘Bottle Toss’, ‘Frog Hop’ and ‘Horse Races’ all of which equate to uninspiring time-wasters. The horse riding at ‘The Farm’ however is fairly enjoyable where you saddle up and race down a mini meadow jumping obstacles along the way. The gameplay here is actually quite good (compared to the rest of the game) but is spoilt by the stereotypical embodiment of someone from the South yelling “Yee-haw” and “Darn” at every opportunity which is especially odd when you realise that through 80% of the game mouth movement is absent, even during conversation based cutscenes.
Maybe I’m being too harsh on this title. Hannah Montana: The Movie Game could certainly be much worse so if you have an 8 year old daughter/niece/sister and are looking for the perfect gift, then buy her a horse this game. If you’re a trophy fiend, then give it a rent. It clearly wasn’t created for a gamer like myself and unless mummy or daddy are reading this review to you, then it probably won’t be anything up your proverbial street either.
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