With The Bullwinkle Show ending in 1964, the age of those who grew up in the moose and squirrel's heyday skews a little older than most gamers are. Thank God, as anyone who grew up loving their zany antics would die of a broken heart trying to play through their mini-game collection offered over Xbox Live Arcade.
At first glance, the developers nailed the look, feel, and tone of the shows. The game offers up mini-games based on seven different shows, and their characters; including Mr. Peabody, Boris and Natasha, Dudley Do-Right, and lesser known Aesop and Son. The problems begin as soon as you attempt to play one of the games. Blink and you might miss it. Each 'show' consists of five levels, each level including a few mini-games and one 'boss battle' to get to the next level. As the level of the 'show' goes up, so does the difficulty.
Well, 'difficulty' might be stretching it. For most of the mindless button-mashing miniatures, that is a difference of hitting the 'A' button twice on Level One and maybe a dozen times on Level Five to 'win'. To be fair, there are a few games that do pose a challenge; although it is more of the 'what in the hell am I supposed to do' variety, than the 'this is hard' type. Before each event, the game flashes a screen with instructions on what to do. Most of the time, the instructions are spot-on, and require something so mindless that you could pass the 'challenge' by accidentally dropping the controller on the ground.
Games involving 'aiming', like Bullwinkle's darts game, ask you to aim for the center of the board. Strangely, that is exactly what they want you to do. The game never asks you to hit a second button to throw the dart; it does that for you as soon as the crosshairs hits the center. Other games give you the seemingly simple task to "Use good timing to jump high enough". The game itself flashes the 'A' button, but never tells you whether to hit it on the way up or the way down. Trail and error in a game that is over faster than a high-school virgin getting laid for the first time does not work well. The game even botches some of the button-mashing events, by making you button mash with your triggers. The developers deserve some sort of anti-medal for figuring out how to screw up a button-mashing mini-game.
One way or another, most games are over in five-seconds or under. The incredibly shallow, short games might be tolerable if they incorporated any of the fantastic personality of the cartoon into the games, but even the few games where the characters bother to make an appearance feel incredibly stale. It feels like a generic cash-in on a terrific, much-loved franchise. Though the voices show up from time to time in the menus, none are inside the games themselves. Some games have seemingly nothing to do with the show itself, unless you are a Rocky And Bullwinkle historian. The tiny details they turned into minigames might impress the cartoon's faithful fans, but perhaps they should have focused more on making them good rather than obscure.
Beating the minigames wins you cereal 'box tops', which can be used in the in-game store to purchase items to enhance your score in certain levels. If you can get past all else wrong with the game, it does keep you playing a little longer, just to see what all the additional items do. The game also attempts to stretch out your playing time by offering a 'rerun' mode, where you have the chance to put together your own set of minigames, from any of those you have unlocked. Rather than keeping together all the Fractured Fairytales offerings together, you can pick and choose bits from any of the 'shows', to help keep things fresh.
Those looking to this as a party game to play with friends on the 360 can look elsewhere. Rather than offer up a brisk, fast-paced competition amongst friends, Rocky And Bullwinkle offer turn-taking mini-games. Gamers can look forward to sharing the same controller with a room full of friends, as you take turns completing levels; rather than competing against one another in a real form of competition. As a result, there is no Live support also, outside of the standard leaderboards. Ironically enough, the game does finally offer something else to do with your Live Vision camera, with a special set of games for it; but you are not really that desperate for Vision content, are you?
What at first sounds like 'fun for the whole family' turns out to be a bad case of 'fun for nobody.' Rocky And Bullwinkle is an unfortunate case of a good license slapped on a terrible excuse for a game.
