Genre: Action/Adventure
Publisher: Konami
Developer: Frontier Development
Release Date: September 27, 2005

Wallace and Gromit may well be two of the best-loved lumps of plasticine on the entire Earth by this point. (Okay, so their major competition was Gumby and Pokey. That isn't really saying much, I guess. They're still pretty darned beloved, mind you.) Aardman Animations created the British dog-and-inventor show back in 1989, and since then, they've enjoyed quite a bit of commercial success between DVDs, short films, their first full-length movie, and even a prior game (Wallace and Gromit in Project Zoo) not too long ago. That previous gaming effort was a straightforward 3D platformer. It had amusing cut scenes and was rather fun to play around with, but the experience was marred by poor controls, questionable level design, and some very odd and unintuitive goals to carry out.

Their latest game, Wallace and Gromit: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit, is based on the full-length movie of the same name released a bit earlier this year. The game itself is a free-roaming, sandbox-style affair along the lines of Lego Island or the not-for-kids Grand Theft Auto releases. It has amusing cut scenes and is rather fun to play around with, but the experience is marred by poor controls, questionable level design, and some very odd and unintuitive goals to carry out.

I guess some things just don't change, y'know?

Curse of the Were-Rabbit has a plotline kind of loosely tied in with the movie's, although the game spends a lot more time developing and changing the motivations of secondary characters that were largely gag-related in the movie itself. The night of the Veggie Festival is quickly approaching in the town of Tottington, and the ever-enterprising Wallace has formed the Anti-Pesto Task Force to keep the gardens of the small town pest-free. They don't do this with guns, of course. Wallace and Gromit wouldn't touch the things! No, instead they use a number of clever Wallace's various inventions, first and foremost among them the BunGun, a high-powered super-sucker made from a converted vacuum cleaner.

This makes the game play sort of like an eye-crossing hybrid mash-up between Luigi's Mansion, Pikmin and Grand Theft Auto at first, as you roam the town herding rabbits out of gardens and slurping objects into your BunGun to fire pumpkin projectiles at window boxes full of lapine invaders. Most of the initial gameplay involves getting the waves of rabbits away from the prize veggies and into holes or traps, where they'll be humanely boxed off and stored in the hutches in Wallace's basement. After a point, though, Wallace has the idea to brainwash the bunnies into going off the idea of vegetables entirely.

Hands up, anyone who sees a disaster coming? Uh-huh.

Wallace's idea is to connect the industrial-sized BunVac 6000 (a much, much larger version of the BunGun) up to his own brain and suck out anti-vegetable thoughts with which to bombard the bunnies. Of course Something Goes Horribly Wrong, and of course the machine goes from "suck" to "blow" mid-stream and blasts Wallace's tender brainmeats with pure rabbity thoughts and one of the rabbits with Wallacey thoughts. Long story short (too late!), during the nights of Tottington, the were-rabbit stalks the streets. Also, a tiny fuzzy were-Wallace hangs around with Gromit. They name him Hutch.

Thus, you settle into a kind of rut for a while, running daytime Anti-Pesto missions with Wallace and Gromit together, both armed with BunGuns. You're pretty free to roam about town, and I have to say that it looks somehow right. You could almost imagine, as you gaze at the small-town British streets, that if the camera pulled back just a little bit more, you could see full-sized claymation experts leaning in over the sets, opening a window here, resetting a puzzle over there, and trying not to leave too many fingerprints as they position a character on a street corner so you can ask him about his garden. The world looks much like it does in the movie, perfectly to scale and amusingly ridden with little details that reflect the signature Aardman humor.

Each of the people you meet while wandering about town will probably have a job for you that will require creative use of some tool you have about your person. Wallace or Hutch (since he essentially has Wallace's brain) can repair machines and tinker with them to build new ones, and this leaves Gromit free to handle much of the legwork. (This is handy, because Gromit is also in much better physical shape than Wallace is. Too much cheese, you understand.) You can swap between the characters at any time as long as they're with you; also pretty much any point, a second player can show up, plug in a controller, and assist you in your missions. This feature can make a pain-in-the-butt mission ... well, not easier, but much less of a pain in the butt.

In the meantime, you'll explore creative uses of your BunGun to do things that frankly impress the heck out of me. With a bit of modification, it can serve as a grappling hook (a requirement for all games nowadays, I feel), a high-powered veggie-shooting Gatling gun, a glider with the optional umbrella attachment, or just a high-powered sucking device to loosen stuck doors and drag out coins from under hard-to-reach places. No game has ever done quite this much with the awesome power of sucking up stuff before.

Meanwhile, at night, it's up to Gromit and Hutch alone to deal with the rising problem of the were-rabbit as he rampages through town, and this is the mode where you end up with much of this game's version of "boss fights," which are surprisingly engaging and difficult. This is a good thing largely because (and I never thought I'd say this) herding bunny rabbits and other fauna of the city and trapping them does eventually get really tedious and dull. Mind you, there are other mini-missions, from delivering items around the city to playing little soccer mini-games and the like, but those serve mainly to win you collectable "trading cards," which serve only one purpose: to allow you to pass an arbitrary barrier later in the game.

The upside, however, is that wandering around the town isn't unfun at all. There are a lot of in-jokes to explore and discover, including some gags you'll only get if you watched the little-known Cracking Contraptions DVD. Wallace happily calls out a "Hallo!" to everyone he passes, and passersby stop and chatter back. It's a very strong and friendly atmosphere. The music, meanwhile, changes dynamically depending on your situation – heroically stopping pests from eating stuff sounds different from skulking around in the forest at night. It's catchy, but not very memorable.

That's the real problem with Curse of the Were-Rabbit is that they took so much time setting up a situation that looks and sounds gloriously Wallace-and-Gromitty, and then they spoil it with fairly generic free-roaming missions. Deliver this, play this racing mini-game, yawn. Stop the sheep from eating the giant lettuce head. You've protected the whatsit before in other games, haven't you? Fight this rampaging Were-Weasel.

(Okay, the were-weasels are pretty cool. Actually, there are a host of were-beasts that ... pretty much come out of the woodwork, were-badgers and were-chickens and the like. There's a subplot about Victor the Evil Hunter and how he copied Wallace's original experiment to mutate the wildlife around the town, but I wasn't buying that story at all. The man isn't smart enough to copy the way Wallace ties his shoes, let alone Wallace's Mighty Science Inventor Powers.)

I find that I'm actually struggling for words to describe why I was so frustrated with Curse of the Were-Rabbit. Maybe it was how terribly off the double-jump felt when Gromit was doing a high-flying platforming move. Maybe it was the awkward animations the characters would periodically slip into, looking more jerky than the usual smoothly animated characters. It could possibly have been the uninspired mission design, or the let-down feeling I had when I realized that the developers had twiddled the hilarious movie plotline to incorporate a number of plot-holes and other traditional video game flaws. Perhaps this just wasn't meant to be a video game at all.

On the other hand, when Curse of the Were-Rabbit was in top form, it was fun and funny to play with. Sure, you're just roaming around town collecting coins and herding rabbits, but you're doing it in a world filled with wry British humor and high-powered suction guns, and that counts for a lot. What I'm trying to say here is that there are a lot more ups and downs than I really feel comfortable dealing with in a game with this much potential. I can't possibly advise you to buy this game unless you're a hardcore fan and you can deal with the flaws just to get your fix of good voice acting and plasticine dreams. if you have any reservations at all about this title, you should really give it a rental before you lay hands on it. It's a good effort, but it's just not worth more than bargain bin prices.

Score: 6.5/10