The Spiderwick Chronicles

Outside of the Spiderwick grounds the level design becomes confused, despite the relatively small play area. Identical-looking leafy paths and rocky tunnels twist and turn back on themselves, and it's easy to get in a muddle as you try to remember the quickest way to get from the forest road to the caves. One quest in particular, involving a griffin, relies on the sudden and inexplicable use of hidden teleporting trees and will frustrate its intended audience no end. Control isn't so bad, with a subtle lock-on feature that ensures kids won't get trampled in a melee and responsive attack moves. However, the automated jumping, which triggers whenever you reach a ledge, isn't quite so well planned. In the underground caves, as you battle goblins on thin pathways above an abyss, it's all too easy to wander too close to the edge and make a suicidal leap into the chasm.

So it's a decent-but-compromised action-adventure with an encroaching emphasis on combat mash-ups. Nothing to get excited about, but probably worth a rental for the eight hours it'll take to play through. Where the game really falls apart is the ending. There are eight chapters, and the seventh - the big confrontation with Mulgarath - takes the form of a long-winded escort mission as you keep family members safe from invading goblins. Hmm. It then gets even more irritating, placing you in a split-second instant-death no-checkpoints chase sequence with Mulgarath himself, during which you will die and restart (and watch short unskippable cut-scenes) many times before you realise where you're supposed to be going.

It's after you beat that section that the game really sticks it in and twists it around though. Having defeated the evil monster, you're then told that if you want to play the final (brief) chapter and see the end of the story you'll need to complete the Field Journal. This means catching every sprite in the game, finding every item and completing every not-optional-after-all side quest. None of these tasks are particularly arduous (though the location of some of the sprites can be confusing) but it does mean another few hours of backtracking and searching right when you were enjoying the glow of victory. In any game, such a switcharoo would be annoying. In a kids' game, it's downright sadistic.