The Shrekoning: Shrek (Xbox)

Somebody who is first introduced to Shrek by the memetic comedy he crops up in online rather than Dreamworks’s four animated films based on the ornery but good-hearted ogre might not realize how important they were in their time. Not only was Shrek a breakthrough hit for Dreamworks but one that did so by directly lampooning the saccharine Disney cartoon mold, forgoing singing in favor of licensed music, depicting fairy tales as rougher and less clean stories, and even being one of the first big hits to usher in the era of 3D computer animation. Not only was this a big step for the industry, but three of the four films were really good, not only as comedies but as character-focused stories that explore Shrek’s struggles with his identity. The fact they could even justify the occasional potty humor as part of a narrative about accepting even grosser parts of one’s self shows these weren’t just the merchandising mammoths the franchise eventually warped into before new films stopped being made, but interestingly enough Dreamworks didn’t seem to realize the potential of Shrek from the start. They signed a five-year licensing deal with the publisher TDK that had formed from two separate companies who mostly made licensed games for preschoolers. A game simply titled Shrek would end up being a launch title for the then-new Xbox system, and with it releasing almost half a year after the film it would have all the good will of that first installment to ride to high sales.

It is then rather odd that the game avoids so much of the film’s characters and iconography in favor of its own adventure. The game still stars Shrek, but the film’s antagonist Farquaad is never mentioned, Shrek’s good friend Donkey is entirely absent, and the Dragon is only found flying harmlessly over one of the stages. Instead, this particular adventure involves a new villain named Merlin years before Shrek the Third would reimagine him, this Merlin capturing Shrek’s beloved Princess Fiona and locking her away in his tower. However, since the tower is shrouded in a fog, Shrek must perform Good Deeds around the kingdom, interacting with warped versions of familiar fairy tale characters as he works towards clearing that fog away and saving Fiona. The Magic Mirror from the film is one of the few returning characters oddly enough, presenting the tutorial and story set up in a game show presenter style that does make it seem like the developers must have seen the film instead of simply running on a summary or trailer, but besides the opener in his swamp home, Shrek spends the adventure exploring new areas and assisting new characters like a short and squat Prince Charming before he’d also be reimagined in the films. Your interactions with them are usually one-note, Shrek for example meeting Humpty Dumpty but he just tries to block you from returning egg children to a goose. Weirdly enough though, each world’s set of missions is presented in a storybook form with a woman narrating it and doing voices for everyone, reading about supposed meetings Shrek has with these characters if you choose to peruse it.

The actual action of Shrek for Xbox takes the form of a 3D platformer although it is hardly a smooth one. One of the first things you’ll realize is Shrek’s movement speed is variable and inexplicable. He can sometimes build up impressive momentum without even holding down the run button, able to launch himself off the top of a staircase if you approach it too quickly. It can be difficult to determine when he might pick up the pace and in areas like the Molasses Sewers where you need to cross thin platforms and drops can take a while to climb back up from such slippery movement physics are irritating, but his jumping is at least decent. It’s responsive and can be adjusted in midair, but many areas of the game seem to like putting a ledge just out of reach where the inclusion of a double jump would help you to do simple navigation. The game might be wanting to keep certain objectives out of reach though, but the wall jump ends up filling in for better jumping options and leads to some odd moments. While it’s responsive and easy to pull off, sometimes you need to pull off an unusual angle like when you need to wall jump over a gate in Red Dragon Castle. That particular gate looks similar to fences that had invisible walls over them in previous levels to keep you from exploring outside of the world’s boundaries, the wall jump has to be set up in an odd way to even clear the gate that has a few mission objectives behind it, and nothing that indicates that area is important is visible until you explore past the area you can initially see from the other side of the gate.

That gate is definitely the most egregious moment of being a poor fit for your abilities and one that stands against what you learned in other levels, but Shrek has a few moves in his arsenal beyond navigation skills. Shrek can let out fart clouds provided he’s eaten enough onions to fill his meter, and while these can stun enemies, the range on them is so small that even when you’re attempting it deliberately for a specific mission you’ll likely need to repeat it a few times. Shrek can burp as well, although this only important for when he’s eaten a chili pepper and can briefly breathe fire. The fire can light the farts for an explosion which has better range than the fart clouds at least, but the skills Shrek is meant to rely on in combat are a poor bunch. Shrek can grab enemies and characters and kick them away, but if it isn’t a friendly character, they’ll often escape pretty quickly and damage you while doing so. Therefore it’s often best to knock them out before you grab and carry them to a destination, although there’s a few issues with this approach. The first is it takes a few kicks to briefly daze them, and they will wake back up in a few seconds and try to break free. Secondly, almost no enemy in Shrek for Xbox can be permanently defeated. If it’s part of a mission objective you can permanently incapacitate things like rats or ice cream guards, but for the most part you knock them out briefly and they’ll get back up later to cause more trouble. This can lead to awful situations like when you need to take Prince Charming to his princess, but she’s on the top floor of the castle. This means you’ll need to knock him out to keep him from escaping as you climb floor after floor, knocking him out again every time he escapes and tries to run back to the bottom floor all while every other enemy in the level is also active and trying to stop you.

The Good Deeds you need to complete to unlock new levels often involve moving characters around and many of them are unwilling to go easily, and even when an objective is instead something like beating a boss it’s often just more about getting to them and unleashing an explosive fart or kicking them around a bunch. Each of the six normal worlds features six missions to complete, although two of them are the same in every world. One of those missions involves finding the hidden Easter Eggs and giving the player a reason to explore the layout of a level is a fairly sound mission concept. The other though involves hunting down all the evil fairies who will start to fly away when Shrek approaches, some passing through walls or moving out of sight thanks to the game’s poor camera controls that can mean being a little too high makes them practically invisible. Fairies also won’t show up until you’re close enough so you can’t scan the larger levels for them from a distance. The other missions encountered in stages rarely deviate from the ideas of beating a boss in a very bland fight or moving a character or group of characters from one place to another as the objective. This practically guarantees most levels come down to the frustrating hunt for fairies, aggravating escorting of ornery characters, or battles that lack any real punch, and some of the goals that get a bit more creative can have technical problems like an important character not appearing or ending up in a spot where they can’t be moved to the objective anymore.

There is a bit of an unusual choice with what worlds were designed for this Shrek game as well. The first level is a very fitting idea, Mother Goose Land featuring an idyllic medieval community but with things like the giant shoe an old lady lives in from the nursery rhyme and Little Bo Peep’s sheep having a pen you need to put them in. The second world though is a dreary and grimy place called Sweetsville Industrial Park and later you head to the Molasses Sewers for a second dose of unappealing brown industry grime, both trying to justify themselves by saying that murky liquid coming out of factory pipes is sweet syrup instead of sewage. The two castle levels do a good job setting themselves apart though, Prince Charming’s Castle about an interior space while Red Dragon Castle focuses more on outside fortifications. Creepy Crypt’s horror leanings are an interesting touch, but the final confrontation with Merlin takes place in a large tower where a lot of the problems are exacerbated beyond the already poor designs of regular missions. You need to cart around explosives while fiery enemies who don’t die keep trying to ignite it before you reach the doors you’re trying to get through, it essentially an even worse version of the Prince Charming mission but now with a boss fight after it that, if you fail, will require a full level retry.

In most stages completing a single mission will force you to exit afterwards for no discernible reason. The creators of the game reference Super Mario 64 as an influence in interviews and that game at least justified booting you out of a stage after every mission completed by sometimes adding in new elements for different objectives, but you can tackle all six in a Shrek world in any order and the level isn’t altered while attempting different Good Deeds. Perhaps the only world with a major change is Mother Goose Land where you can briefly change it to night, but things return to normal after a short time as well and this decision to limit you to one goal per level run mostly means that you can’t try to mix goals together like collecting all the eggs while also trying to do a character carry mission. The 37 Good Deeds in Story mode though are all achievable and not all of them are necessary for completion even though the bad ideas are too numerous to skip all of them, but the game also introduces a Race mode where you are thrown in a level and need to complete a Good Deed mission in a shockingly tight tight limit. You can pick which Good Deed you tackle in Race mode but Shrek’s unreliable movement and skills and obnoxious mission designs make attempting Race mode an incredibly unappealing prospect.

THE VERDICT: Shrek’s strange movement speed and the sometimes difficult to wrangle camera aren’t even the worst issues with Shrek on Xbox. The mission design in this odd departure from the film’s story line often asks you fight boring battles or cart around ornery characters who constantly break out of your grip. Most enemies can’t be permanently defeated so they hassle you while you’re doing mission objectives and you can only tackle one goal at a time so you can’t speed up the process. A few of the simpler objectives or run-ins with familiar fairy tale characters come out alright, but the overall experience tries your patience again and again while only offering a 3D platformer where the mission design is rarely creative and often just throws a horde of nuisances in your path as its form of difficulty.

And so, I give Shrek for Xbox…

A TERRIBLE rating. Whether or not it chose to stray from the film’s plot is irrelevant as this game’s real bad decisions all come down to the structure of its platforming play. With miserable levels like Merlin’s tower where you struggle to even do the simplest tasks to moments where technical issues make chasing down a fairy or completing an objective harder than it needs to be, Shrek isn’t a game that makes you want to explore and keep doing Good Deeds to get full completion, especially when Race mode adds a time limit to things that seems completely oblivious to how difficult many tasks are. So many levels lean on the concept of grabbing a character and carrying them somewhere with some stages even having you do that for multiple missions, but the constant assaults from enemies you can’t beat and the struggling character in your grip slow down these simple tasks while adding obstructions that only make it frustrating rather than an engaging challenge. While Molasses Sewers has many problems with how it chooses to lay out thin platforms that Shrek can struggle to even stand on properly, it’s particular version of the character carrying mission at least seems to focus more on making the difficulty be the level navigation rather than Prince Charming’s Castle having an entire castle of enemies chasing you while your target keeps trying to break free. At its best a goal will be harmless enough like finding the Easter Eggs usually just asking for good use of your platforming skills and chasing down a dancing cow has your target remain visible the whole time unlike the fairies. Unfortunately the big action moments like boss fights are just constant kicking and farting and the game slips back into bland or roughly designed mission ideas once again.

For some reason Shrek on Xbox was praised for its graphics, possibly because the Xbox in general was allowing for impressive new graphical techniques, but despite claims from IGN, Shrek definitely doesn’t use the same character model from the film. While straying from the plot of the film after it became such a blockbuster success was an odd choice, it’s certainly one of the easier areas to accept while everything else in the ogre’s first Xbox outing came out rough or downright terrible. This game ends up worse than even the usually subpar licensed games of the time, technical issues and mission design making Shrek for Xbox a hard game to play or enjoy.