Review: Madagascar 3: Europe’s Most Wanted

If there’s something the more cynical can be assured of in this industry, it’s thus – games based on established children’s franchises are easy to second-guess. They tend to involve collecting things. Mediocre platforming. Soundalikes of established voice casts. Dismal design traits.

Madagascar 3 adheres to this template with almost admirable professionalism. It makes no secret of it’s soulless purpose, peddling copies to parents through screaming children not old enough to understand that they deserve better. It’s a product which just straddles the required line of functionality.

Loosely based upon the mid-section of the latest Dreamworks movie, the game revolves around Alex, Gloria, Marty and Melman: four New York Zoo escapees who have, over the course of two films, escaped to the titular African island and the continental mainland. The third film places them in Europe, attempting to return home by buying a circus. Which, in a film featuring talking animals, seems almost legitimate.

Thusly, Madagascar 3 involves collecting materials to build the circus across four European locations, through the medium of unenthusiastic platforming. Levels are made for any two of the characters at once, and each has an ability which is ritualistically abused countless times. It’s not like it makes a heap of sense, at the end of the day: this is a game in which a hippopotamus can tightrope-walk and an extremely athletic lion cannot, despite balancing delicately in the screenshot above. The experience is uncompromisingly awkward.

Navigating the levels of Rome, Pisa, Paris and London is far from a piece of cake, too. A “map” is present in the form of a poorly compressed JPEG of something that might be the area you’re in, showing meaningless coloured blobs to represent the various objectives. If you’re five — which, if playing this, you probably will be — you’re going to have a hard time finding your way around.

In Madagascar 3, a hippo can tightrope walk, but a lion can’t. The lion can balance on things though. Apparently.

This is a game which has been ‘put together’ rather than ‘made’. A very minute number of mechanics have been stretched out over levels designed to accommodate each character’s ability rather than reward player exploration – riding a ghost train as opposed to working your way through a fun house. Half-assed LEGO-style gameplay is supposed to bring two players into the action at once, but this largely revolves waiting for one character to tightrope-walk, swim or destroy an object to open the path ahead.

Each city hub features a collection of repetitive mini-games inside the circus itself: selling tickets, throwing food to the audience, flying through hoops and performing stunts on the trapeze. Clumsy controls hamper a number of them, but they can’t be failed either way – and they change little between the different mini-games, save for throwing in an extra button to press, which does nothing to improve their non-existent worth.

To it’s credit, Madagascar 3 is well-presented. Everybody looks as they should, and the soundalike voicecast is reasonable. There’s even genuine comedy in the script – “Thank you for letting us be a Pisa your evening…yes” – and in the disguising mechanic used to evade European animal control – each character whips out a pair of sunglasses and can walk amongst the people of Rome and Paris without giving themselves away.

Despite the funnies, and some sunglasses, it’s impossible to disguise that this is a mediocre product, born out of a mandatory merchandising contract. Barely functional, just enough to pass the test of being sellable, and with…reasonably pretty box art, Madagascar 3 is probably not worth your time, unless your children are easily amused and as thick as paste. Your kids deserve better – and you deserve something better to play with them. Pick up a LEGO game of your choosing instead; any of them will do.

Tags: D3 Publisher, Europe's Most Wanted, Madagascar 3, PlayStation 3