Gru’s minions can be used in a variety of different ways, either by freezing them into ice cubes and using them to trigger switches, inflating them and using them as balloons, using a small group of them as a rope-bridge, and so on. Some of these levels involve having to be good at jumping, some of them need you to be particularly fast on your feet, but the very best ones force you to utilise Gru’s smiling army of bright yellow minions to assist him.Īnd this is where the game gets clever.
But it’s actually much more of a puzzler, and the majority of the levels involve Gru having to figure out how to get from point A to point B. So the Despicable Me Wii game looks like a simple platform game, very much in the style of some of the earlier Mario titles.
Our favourite involved Gru having a pop at “that fat plumber guy” who also likes to leap around the place, collecting coins and jumping on moving platforms. Some of them are crude, some of them are much funnier if you’ve already seen the Despicable Me movie, and some of them are genuinely clever. Carell’s weird Gru voice is naturally funny, but neither he nor the game’s script writers skimp on the good jokes either.Įvery time you die onscreen Carell will bark something at you, and not only are there are a surprisingly large number of these comments, almost all of them are funny too.
So often in these games the acting talent that contributed to the movie don’t end up contributing to the game as well, so this is really refreshing. As you can tell (even from that brief story outline) the plot is completely off the wall and occasionally downright bizarre, and the game has that same air of oddball lunacy about it.Īfter you take part in the tutorial (sorry, Gru-torial) designed to show you the ropes, you’re briefed on your first mission by Gru himself – voiced as he is in the movie, by Steve Carell. If you haven’t seen the movie yet, it’s a very funny comedy about a nasty piece of work called Gru (played by Carell) who, for reasons that are too complicated to go into here, ends up adopting three young sisters, on his way to stealing the moon from the sky. This new trend doesn’t appear to be showing any signs of stopping, because now the new animated Steve Carell comedy Despicable Me has a new tie-in game, and it’s just as good as the movie.
First the tremendous Toy Story 3 movie got an equally superb game adaptation released alongside it back in July, and a bit more recently the big-budget blockbuster The Last Airbender got a really terrific Wii game too.
Buy Despicable Me on Nintendo Wii, DS, PS2 & PSP from nowĢ010 has been a brilliant year for videogames that have been based on big Hollywood movies.