Chicken Little Review

The Sky is Falling--Gameplay

If you know the Chicken Little story or you have seen the preview for the movie, then you know Chicken Little witnesses a world-altering event and tries to warn everyone. Because he’s unpopular, no one will listen to him, so Chicken Little and his friends take it upon themselves to save the world. And that’s the same story in the game.

Most of the time you’ll play Chicken Little, but every so often you’ll get to play Runt (the pig) or Abby (the mallard). The levels consists of ledges, wires you glide on, trampolines and other similar staples of the action-platformer genre. You engage in such activities as collecting coins to buy a soda, finding the batteries for a teleporter, and chasing down a beam of light. Not terribly hard puzzles because the gameplay is mostly linear.

The levels progress in chunks which mean you don’t move on to the next section until you figure out how to get there. In the five hours it took me to beat the game, I got stuck twice, maybe three times.

There are smaller things to do to keep you interested. Collect acorns to increase your lives. You have an egg meter that increases one egg at a time when you collect a certain amount of acorns. If you die, or get hit by a Chicken Little clone, then you lose an egg. You really don’t die in the game. If you lose all your eggs, you just start over from the previous checkpoint. You can also unlock the mini-games by collect 5 special cards per level. There are actually more than 5 cars on each level and they aren’t in difficult spots to find.

The mini-games are what will keep you playing after you beat the game. Play dodgeball, a simple form of baseball, sliding Runt through obstacle courses; just little quick and easy games that will wile away some of your time.

Can I See the Sky Falling?—Graphics

There’s nothing about the graphics in Chicken Little that will blow you away. It’s a cartoon and you can feel it in the visuals. You get some nice cut-scenes from the actual movie (though slightly less crisp) which look good, but when it jumps back into the game, you see a little blockiness to everything. The positive side is that since it is a cartoon, the colors are bright, the characters are modeled nice, and the backgrounds are detailed enough to keep you interested.

There were some problems with collisions and detecting ledges. Chicken Little disappeared into walls and could actually walk a little past the edge of a cliff or roof without falling. Also, there was a glitch when the game went from the game to a movie cut-scene. It flashed to your ending screen when you finished a level. Probably more a programming error than anything, but it still showed that this game appeared rushed.

Some of the levels are prettier than the others (like the first time you travel around the spaceship) and the mini-games are nice, but since there’s not a lot pushing the limits of the Xbox, you get a game that could have been on the early days of the PS2.

I Love Me Some Running Chickens—Controls

I hate to bash something about a kid’s game, but the controls in Chicken Little got annoying after a while. The left stick moves Chicken Little—push slightly to walk and push a lot to run. The right stick makes you look around. Okay, not terribly mind-boggling, but the default for the right stick was weird. Then I realized that my natural turn to look around in real-life wasn’t the same as in the game. I had to invert the look control. Otherwise, actually moving Chicken Little was decent. Felt heavy when you had to stop and change directions, but that could just be due to poor reactions on my part.

One thing that plagues 3D-platformers is the poor camera. Chicken Little also has poor camera angles and often gets ‘stuffed’ when you move into a wall or a corner. You can’t find your way out to fix the camera. I usually just restarted the level at the last checkpoint. If you push down on the right stick you can re-center the camera behind you, but when you really need the camera on your side, it became frustrating.

Thompson’s Two Cents

Despite the issues, I found this game to be addicting for 5 hours or so. I enjoyed watching little scenes from the movie and playing the mini-games, which played like Mario Party games. Kids, Disney fans, and 3D-platformer lovers (that’s me) are sure to enjoy this game, but hardcore gamers may find no challenge in Chicken Little or will just be bored.