Some are sheer, heart-rending travesties, the end-product result of nothing more wrong than honest, old-fashioned ineptitude. Others are the result of pure weapons-grade, Enron-style, shovelware-oriented Evil. Some just sorta fall short, even if their source material is good stuff. The Disney/Pixar film WALL-E is very good stuff indeed.
You can probably see where this is headed.
In terms of settings, progression, character charm, and audio/visual stylings, WALL-E starts off on solid tractor-treads: WALL-E -- the last trash-compacting robot on a garbage-mound of an Earth abandoned by humanity for some 700 years -- goes about his lonely routine of jamming the chaos of mankind's cast-off crap into orderly little cubes to be arranged into skyscrapers of refuse.
One day, EVE -- a sleek, high-tech and decidedly feminine robotic counterpart to his dorky boxishness -- literally comes down from the stars to see if Garbagedump Earth can support plant life again.
WALL-E's fascination with/crush on this ergonomically-designed angel ultimately leads him to follow her into deep space -- where the fat-assed, consumer-zomboid remnants of humanity hover around in easy chairs, growing morbidly obese from a combination of microgravity, inactivity, and 24/7 consumption of Buy-N-Large megacorporate products (the sole cause of all the crap now piled all over the Earth, and in fact in a dense orbital cloud thereabout).
Just like the film, the game's early segments are a surreal, lonely exercise in trash-compacting, platform-hopping, bauble-collecting and light puzzle-solving (the best bits are the rotating-cylinder "tumbler" challenges). Players learn early on how to compact trash into cubes that can be used as batteries (to charge long-drained mechanisms), weights (to unlock certain barriers) and ballistic tools (to hit environmental switches).
Once EVE lands, the game introduces new gameplay elements such as EVE's effortless flight and some real firepower (her right arm/fin/airfoil thingy is also an energy gun).
There are even segments where the two characters are played at the same time, as a time -- WALL-E handling the earthbound, tread-based robot tasks, EVE boosting him over certain jumps and pitfalls with a "Stork Jump" move, and whipping out the plasma-beam to take out hazardous objects being blown about in the many massive sand-storms that rage across the planet surface. Despite the slaving of one character to the other, the scheme actually works well.
Once in space, the game trades the bleak metallic and browns wastescape of the Earth for the massive Starliner Axiom -- whose interiors are a mix of functional, high-security corridors and outlandish, advertising-plagued, shopping-mall-acid-trips on a cruise-liner-from-the-seventh-circle-of-Bladerunner-Hell vistas.
None of the robots out here are as sympathetic or innocent as our two heroes: When WALL-E and EVE aren't slinging trash-cubes to thwart security systems or flying around massive service bays (or the vacuum of space), they're battling waves of security 'bots that are, thankfully, almost as stupid as they are persistent and evil.
The good news: When WALL-E's gameplay is on target, it really evokes the feel, if not anything like the verbatim script, of the movie. The opening segments on an eerie, trashy, abandoned Earth have that same sense of overwhelming desolation. Once EVE shows up, her simple, breezy flight-and-fight mechanics offer some welcome action and good-natured "gunplay."
But while the overall visual-effects quality is definitely on the underwhelming side (by new generation standards, anyway), the cinematics convey exactly the sort of character charm and humor that fuel the big-screen counterpart. Seen on their own, said cinematic interludes would arguably tell a less-than-airtight version of the story.
The bad news: There's rather a lot of it. The game's environments themselves are well-designed enough, perhaps too linear, but the general visual quality is not suggestive of a Pixar-borne venture; WALL-E and EVE's digital blurps and calls are perfectly crisp, but the repetitiousness of the ambient audio will drive anyone over seven years old to Hangoverville quickly.
More serious are the myriad general hiccups and malfunctions sprinkled lightly but evenly throughout the game, the oft-iffy camera, the repetitive, cramped, tunnel/flight sequences, the numerous-but-dumb robotic foes, and the phoned-in multiplayer, just to name a few.
The biggest letdown, however, is the skimpiness of the collectables and extras -- it's neat to search a far-flung nook and find a Buzz Lightyear action figure, or the "Wallop" WALL-E tokens that unlock concept art and character-skin options, but there's not nearly enough of it; certainly not enough to warrant a replay of the basically-linear game itself.
A little more in the way of behind-the-scenes/making-of material, or even clips from the actual film (beyond the game's cinematics) would have gone a fair way toward giving this game some replay legs.
WALL-E isn't the movie-licensed game disaster that it very well could have been, it isn't even critically broken, and it certainly isn't devoid of heart. But there are basically two kinds of people this game is presumably intended for: Kids who are gamers, and gamers who are still, in some sense, kids. They're both going to come away from this one feeling like they're missing a little something... like half of the money they spent on it.
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