Last year's "The Golden Compass" might follow in the footsteps of "Lemony Snicket's A Series of Unfortunate Events," being a theatrical adaptation of a mega-popular children's book series that did so poorly at the box office that the next chapter may never be filmed. "A Series of Unfortunate Events," however, was an excellent movie and its videogame adaptation wasn't that bad, though it was far from being an outstanding example of interactive entertainment. The same cannot be said for "The Golden Compass," a passable movie that in turn has generated one of the worst licensed games of the last few years.

One would expect a licensed game to retell the story of the book or movie. Strangely, The Golden Compass just assumes that whomever is playing it is already familiar with characters and situations. There's no coherent storytelling: the game starts with the main character, Lyra Belacqua, riding a giant polar bear in a mission to save her friend Richard and other children from the clutches of a Siberian tribe. There's no mentioning the important role that daemons --incarnations of people's souls -- have in the movie and in the books written by Philip Pullman, so new players have no hope of understanding what's going on and the nature of the danger threatening the children. The only details are given by cheesy lines of dialogue, informing us that "armored bears enjoy fighting as much as humans enjoy breathing" and so on.


The situation doesn't get better after the Siberian chief is defeated: at this point the storytelling jumps back to Jordan College in London, where Lyra was a student before being involved in a series of unfortunate events... or so it seems. The main problem here is the extremely bad quality of the cut-scenes. Developer Shiny, most recently responsible for Enter the Matrix and The Matrix: Path of Neo, inserted some footage from the movie here and there just to give it some continuity and show the real actors, who look as far from their digital avatars as you can imagine. The movie footage is badly cut and it features such a low volume compared to the rest of the game that players are forced to constantly turn up the volume to hear what's happening.

Most of the action consists of dumbed-down platforming, either controlling Lyra or the armored bear Iorek. Controls are so simplified that it's not even possible to adjust the camera, so many failures will be a direct consequence of jumping without an idea of where the characters will be landing. As a result, controls that should be simple enough for children end up being nearly impossible for anyone to play. When using Iorek, gameplay is set up so that the bear doesn't even have to jump: when he is close to an edge, a context-sensitive button can be pressed at any moment, resulting in a canned jump animation. There's no reason for such a feature, not even when a game is aimed towards young audiences who can likely perform a simple jump. As for fighting, Iorek has a few basic attacks, not all of them effective: he can swat enemies with his claws, grab them and use them as a weapon, or block for defense, which is useless in most cases. There is also a rage attack where he pounds the ground creating a shockwave that is supposed to damage everything nearby, but doesn't work as well as it should because its range is too short.