GENRE
	Action Adventure
	DEVELOPER
	Vicarious Visions
	PUBLISHER
	Activision
	NUMBER OF PLAYERS
	1
	CONNECTIVITY
	No
	BUY NOW AT

It's good that games are still being made for the Game Boy Advance, even if most of the new releases skew more towards younger audiences or licensed fare. Unfortunately, Over the Hedge for the GBA is a typical example of uninspired licensed game design.

visuals

Over the Hedge (OTH) uses a three-quarters top-down view for its action. The camera pans left to right over brightly, template-ized stage layouts. The main characters-- the good guys, that is-- are fluidly animated sprites capable of walking or running in eight directions and who very closely resemble their CG film counterparts. The few enemy types the woodland creatures encounter-- patrolling humans, giggling children, cats, dogs, and aggressive girl scouts-- are simply designed and vividly colored. A refreshing touch was that the humans, while sporting next to no differentiation in clothing or hairstyles-- every man, woman and child looked just like the next one-- at least sported racially diverse color palette swatches, giving some multi-cultural flavor to what could have been a very white suburban neighborhood.

As the game only has four different level types, gamers will only see four types of game maps: forest maze, sidewalk obstacle course, yard obstacle course, and rooms in human houses. Each level uses the same few pieces of graphics for its layout. The forest has bush hedges, logs, and gleaming thorny plants. The sidewalk features games of hopscotch, people, and color palette-swatched cars. The yard has lawn ornaments, cats, dogs, fountains and yard furniture. And the house, depending on the room, features kitchen counters, differing types of carpet, couches, TVs, and the like. The items are worth listing just on the fact that they're seen so often, level after level; things feel very monotonous after awhile. The cookie-cutter world architecture of many other games-- lava world, snow world, desert world, forest world-- seems like a cornucopia of variety next to OTH. Then again, this game is about the cookie-cutter designs of our own real world: when is the last time you saw much variety in any corporate-planned suburb? Not that this means we should expect the same monotony in game design. After dragging logs and boulders the umpteenth time in a forest maze, even a young child's eyes may glaze over, periodically snapped back to awareness when the rare screen-grab from the movie pops up to move the story along.

audio

Sound-alikes have provided quippy phrases of victory or defeat for each of the main characters, and the humans and their pets each have a vocal sound effect or two. The girly-voiced shrieks of shock from the adult males, nearly identical to their female counterparts, are a hoot. Household appliances and the menacing Verminator's traps also have a digitized sound effect to signal their on/off state. Other than that and some tinkling, strangely Culture Club-Meets-Dentist xylophone music, there's not too much to say on the audio front. The GBA's cart can't hold too much in way of data, but something more in line with Ben Folds' cool piano/vocals soundtrack for the film would have been neat.

gameplay

The game's story follows that of the movie, although it's naturally not as smoothly told due to the interactive, level-based requirements a game requires. Many choice lines of dialogue are also quoted from the movie (without the smart voice acting of the film to accompany them), but some of the intended humor falls flat. Otherwise, the gameplay connecting all this together is very simple: collect candy (in-game currency) and food (to move the story along) while navigating one of four level environments that always proceed in the same order and must always be completed one after the other for most of the game's "chapters." As mentioned above, the four environments are forest, street, yard, and house.

The forest environment requires dragging of rocks and boulders to get through a maze-like environment, the only dangers being thorn bushes that only damage when accidentally run into. The street environment is stealth-like in structure and will only flow left and right or up and down depending on which templated level is chosen. While navigating the asphalt, either RJ the Racoon or Vern the Turtle must go into hiding or disguise if an adult is facing him, and children must simply not be touched, although the kids are allowed to see the animals and won't react. If seen by adults or touched by a child, the level ends. In the yard environments, RJ or Vern must navigate around yard furniture while avoiding bull dogs and combating angry "ninja" cats in order to find an electronic collar allowing entry into the house. Once inside the house, the street stealth gameplay returns: gamers must avoid adults and children while picking up every scrap of food in a given room in order to proceed.

As a game intended for children, it's easy to play and the objectives are simple. Aside from a few unique levels that require scaring off girl scouts or outrunning a crazy dog, however, everything's very monotonous. Even the most Ritalin-infused kid will have a hard time not getting bored, and insult is added to injury when the player is told he's required to play a certain chapter (forest, then street, then yard, then house) over and over just to collect an arbitrary number of three food types, which, by the way, are only obtainable within the house levels and are small in number. The designers tried to compensate this artificial game lengthener by randomizing the selection of which templatized forest, then street, and so on level is selected for a given mission, but at the end of the day it's still the same thing, and this isn't exactly addictive, Tetris-styled gameplay.

Once the main story is finished, completionists can create new missions by selecting their own sequence of forest to house levels. By playing those missions, or replaying ones from the story mode, gamers can snag more candy, which can be traded in a store to upgrade RJ's and Vern's health, stamina, and moves, or the candy can purchase household items encountered in the house levels to "decorate" the forest hub all chapters are accessed through. Yet players have no control as to what random spot a blender, sink, or Game Boy look-alike will be dropped, and these items merely have on/off settings that briefly animate and play a sound effect, eliminating any desire to work for getting them. They add no value and just clutter the forest hub meaninglessly. In fact, the Game Boy knock off item can be purchased in addition to two games for it-- an animal game and a "cool game." These "games" are only icons, however, and don't offer new experiences, instead taunting the gamer with the idea something genuinely "cool" exists within OTH but is in fact a mirage.

multiplayer

N/A

overall

In this game's credits, there's a list of "kid testers" for the game-- maybe the developers' children. We can only wonder what these kids said when they played this game-- they may have really liked it. Yet if we were recommending either purchasing this game or tickets to the movie to a family with a few kids, the movie would handily win out.

4.5/10