A game based on a movie about three children discovering an unseen, mystical world full of goblins and sprites sounds like an easy transition. Yet, like most movie-to-game transfers, The Spiderwick Chronicles fails to deliver on what probably sounded like a great idea. The game begins as a pair of twin brothers and their older sister move into an old family house with their mother. The game delivers the story in a stylish blend of footage from the film and artwork created for the game. It does a fantastic job of briskly telling the story, giving you just enough detail to keep the story moving along between chapters without boring you with lengthy cut-scenes. It saves the boredom for the gameplay.
Though the story sounds fairly exciting, as the children are tasked with keeping their great Uncle's book away from dangerous, power-hungry forest creatures, the game spends most of its time sending you on gathering quests for various items. In between, you will get to take on a few goblins, but they are incredibly easy to defeat, and pose no real danger. The game has an annoying habit of holding your hand at all times, highlighting items of interest with a glowing hand symbol. The game adds to the frustration by holding you to one definite path through the game. You will come across items that you can easily see will become useful later, but be unable to bring them along with you until the game asks you to find it. It leads to a great deal of backtracking, possibly as a way of artificially extending the game's length.
Regardless of the backtracking, there is too much reliance on item collection and not enough on battling the goblins. Throughout the game, you will get to use all three of the siblings. Each has their own set of weapons and special attacks to unlock, but the fighting never feels exciting because the enemies never put up much of a fight. The game even involves item collection in the battle, as gamers pick up 'goblin teeth' from fallen foes to unlock new fighting moves and asks you to capture sprites for use as power-ups. Once you catch one of the lightning bug like creatures, you have about thirty seconds to 'paint' them in an awkward painting mini-game. Paint them in time, and they hang around and grant you their skill. Failure to paint them in time releases them back to the world, for you to attempt to catch and paint them again. It makes little sense, and is even less fun. Thankfully, gamers can mostly ignore this portion of the game, as the power-up attacks fail to add much to the battles.
The game's control scheme is basic to the point where you could play with an Atari controller. The battles are terribly bland hack-and-slash ventures, and when exploring the land the game only allows you to move or grab items. It limits the controls to the point that it does not even trust you to jump for yourself. Instead, when you get to the edge of a rock or cliff, the game jumps for you in the direction you are facing. In the underground cave level, it leads to some frustrating deaths when your character leaps off small platforms like an overzealous lemming. The game is more interested in having you tangle with the camera than goblins. While most items are clearly marked with the aforementioned hand symbol, it happens on a few occasions that items you need for the main story quest are not. In the rock quarry area of the game, it makes for some frustrating twists of the camera to find a missing fuse, while trying to figure out what jumps you can make versus those you cannot.
