Arthur and the Invisibles follows the story of Arthur, a young boy, who goes in search of a lost treasure in order to save his grandmother from being evicted from her home. Along the way, he transforms into a small creature known as a Minimoy (ant-sized trolls) and teams up with other members of the species to investigate the treasure and save their kind from the evil henchmen. Be warned, the story pans out roughly in the game for those of you that haven’t read the book or seen the movie.
Essentially, the game revolves around you taking control of Arthur and two Minimoys named Selenia and Bétamèche. By using them as a team, you can switch between the characters to take advantage of their special abilities. Arthur, for example, has the ability to climb ledges while Selenia can cut her way through thorny vines. Bétamèche on the other hand, has the ability to shoot his knife at distant targets and also lock onto enemies. As you play through the game, more abilities can be obtained by walking through a special rainbow light. Usually, the light will only give one character a new ability, however, it will occasionally give multiple characters the same new skill.
A stone that sees danger ahead. Just look at its sad face.
Switching between characters has actually been developed into the game deeply. The main objective is to go from room to room solving puzzles and usually their abilities will be used in some form or another. Reaching high places is normally left to Arthur while Bétamèche, being shorter than the rest, can go under small passageways that you would otherwise be unable to navigate. Sadly, the puzzles do get repetitive from time to time. Essentially you either look for a switch to activate a door or bridge or you look for stone pieces to build a totem pole. The totem pole building in particular is a little annoying because you have to move each individual stone onto a pad and place them on top of each other to make a pattern (in this case, a frowned face). It’s not so much the stacking part that’s annoying, it’s more that the players move a little on the slow side and say the same boring comments as they move the heavy stones. “Grandma always wanted me to take up a sport. She’d be so proud.” It was amusing at first, but after hearing it ten times over, it gets over the top. To be fair though, its actually getting to these items that is the real challenge, but as it is aimed towards younger gamers, the game won’t be too difficult for the casual gamer to complete.
To add some variety to the mix, flying, racing and combat sequences have been implemented. One flying sequence is taking control of and riding a mosquito to save trapped Minimoys. It’s basically an on-the-rails shoot out letting you target or free fire at enemy mosquitos while avoiding collision with obstacles in your path and evading enemy fire. Racing is basically trying to prevent events from happening such as driving down a drainpipe in a toy car to avoid drowning in a sea (or puddle from the standard sized human’s point of view) of water.
There are two types of combat you can expect yourself to get into. Firstly is when you’re up against swarms of henchmen. One of the henchmen will have a key that opens up a lock on a door and you’ll have to defeat him, as well as the others, to obtain the key and unlock the door. Other times, you’ll face off against mini-boss battles (if you can call them that) where you have to expose the enemy’s weakness and then using the multiple characters, jump onto the enemy and hit the buttons which appear on screen. It acts similar to Resident Evil 4 where you would have to press the action button to make your character run away from a boulder for example, although not as visually impressive or engaging.
Looks a little like a lollypop.
Aside from this, you will also have to collect Mul Muls (small puffball creatures) who have been caged and left aside in levels to open up new pathways so you can obtain Minimoy Runes. Minimoy Runes cards are scattered across each level and once found, can be selected at the pause screen to view mini-biographies on items and characters. There’s also various “making of the game” videos to unlock upon meeting certain objectives which is the sort of content you’d expect to find on the DVD of Arthur and the Invisibles.
The AI can be questionable at times. As you can only control one character at a time, it’s up to the game’s AI to make sure the other two follow you or do whatever is common practice for the scenario (eg. Fight enemies or stand on a switch). There were a few circumstances where the characters didn’t follow you when you were going to another area. At times, enemies also trapped them because they weren’t quick enough to react to your escape movements leaving you with the task of rescuing them. There are also parts in the game where you are required to use pollen in order to blind or entice enemies out of hiding. To speed up the process of transporting the pollen from area to area, there’s a system where you kick the pollen to the other characters who run ahead of you. Once again, the AI sometimes fails to make the characters run ahead of you and only when you come close to your target, do they start reacting. Generally though, the AI acts the way it’s supposed to but these instances happen a little too often to be completely ignored.
Visually, the game takes all of its environments directly from the movie including under Arthur’s grandma’s house, the garden and underneath the surface of the Earth. While at first glance the textures are all bright and vibrant with colour, there is a serious lack of detail surrounding you. Notably, large open spaces have gigantic housing-like structures surrounding the outer territories only to have a few simple patterns engraved in an otherwise bare landscape. In a nutshell though, the developers have done a great job of capturing the world of the Minimoys. Giant sized centipedes, bees and grass blades the equivalent of a forests are just a few instances that really make you appreciate the work implemented into the visuals. As an added bonus, clips from the film are also included during cutscenes that should make future fans of the movie happy.
Centipedes double as a shady areas on those hot Summer days.
Audio in the game is a little mixed. The soundtrack features a wide variety of simple calm music when solving puzzles to epic powerful up beats during the mosquito flights. Sound effects complement the environmental aspects of the Minimoy world well from the thunderous roars of the centipedes right down to the heavy hovering flaps of a mosquito’s wings. This all falls short with the voice acting however as you’re left with annoying British accents that make you want to punch the Minimoys right out of the TV. As previously stated, there also tends to be the hindrance of comments being repeated by the characters a few too many times and on top of this, their speech is a little too quick for comfort when they’re explaining how the controls work.
Overall, Arthur and the Invisibles is by no means the worst movie licensed game available, in fact, it’s a fresh change from many of the licensed games we reviewed last year. It just gets repetitive from time to time and suffers from average graphics and annoying British accents.
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