The Shrekoning: Shrek 2 (GBA)

Over on the home consoles, the video game adaptation of the film Shrek 2 focused heavily on playing as a team of characters, the PC release of it even being named Shrek 2: Team Action because of it. However, the comparatively weak Game Boy Advance wouldn’t be able to capture the 3D action seen in these titles, but the development team still seemed on board for the idea of a Shrek game focused on characters working together to succeed. Things may have been scaled back to a sidescrolling puzzle platformer for the GBA version, but Shrek 2 on Game Boy Advance perhaps does a better job of emphasizing teamwork than its console counterpart.

Shrek 2 on GBA follows the events of the film with a little less deviation from the events of the films than many licensed movie games. There are no new enemies or locations really, the game mostly fleshing out moments that could have been assumed to happen like Shrek’s friends preparing to free him from prison or the actual walking involved in navigating areas. You do get some reworked situations like the scene where the antagonist’s plan is revealed is now only overheard by Puss in Boots and it happens at a boutique in Far Far Away instead of the Poison Apple Inn, but the game’s 25 levels are fairly short and didn’t seem to feel the need to stretch out the plot to fill those stages. You’ll still get the story of the irritable ogre and his new wife Fiona heading to the Hollywood-inspired Far Far Away to meet her parents, the ogre clashing with the glitz and glamor of royal life, and his efforts to fit in for Fiona’s sake being exploited by a villainous Fairy Godmother, this more focused version perhaps even capturing that story better than Shrek 2 over on the home consoles.

Making the actual legwork of getting from scene to scene into stages does lead to some of the early levels being fairly plain, especially since the teamwork angle that becomes a core part of the experience takes a bit to get going. When you begin you only play as Shrek and he’s not really a capable character, able to lift and move objects so he can give himself boosts for jumping and packing a simple punch and ground pound for attacking enemies, but it’s not a skill set conducive to varied action. Once his talkative friend Donkey joins in and you can swap between them though, the game starts moving towards more puzzle-focused navigation where limited abilities aren’t quite as constraining to how a level plays out. Donkey jumps a little higher than Shrek and can kick heavy objects into new positions, and since beating a level requires getting all characters to the end point you will keep swapping between the two to open paths, use their special skills, or tackle situations differently. Donkey won’t trigger peasant enemies into attacking him, but usually you’re swapping out of necessity rather than picking the character with a better hope of completing a fairly easy area ahead.

For the first two sets of levels the focus is mostly on this simple dynamic and it slowly asks a bit more of you over time, things still pretty simple overall. After the boss fight against Puss in Boots though he joins the team and not only brings more interesting mechanics with his more expansive abilities but enhances the group dynamic as navigation can start to get a bit more involved. Puss can double jump, latch onto the sides of walls to give him more vertical exploration capabilities, and slide down special rope platforms that not only let him build up speed for long distance jumps but he can repeatedly jump up them to get to new areas as well. Puss starts opening up the level design more as he often is called upon to do some deeper exploration than Shrek or Donkey could pull off, some levels even only having you play as him and still turning out decent for it. When the group of three must cooperate though you get levels with little puzzles to figure out on how to get people or objects to the right place, the back half of the game actually making you think a bit rather than just doing the single actions available to the team at the moment.

The design continues to shift around a bit after Puss has joined as well. The Gingerbread Man also joins the team eventually with the highest jumps and long range projectiles, Shrek eventually gets a sword that can deflect incoming projectiles, and even level design concepts begin to change a bit. While the teamwork focused ones are still the most prevalent, you have some stages like an open-ended prison exploration as Gingy where you need to find and destroy all the spotlights and a few timed levels with actually tight timers that require you to figure out how to quickly navigate and solve all the small puzzles along the way. Death isn’t too bad in Shrek 2 on GBA, a fortunate fact since there are a few blind jumps and some have instant death pits near by. You will be made to repeat the level from the start, but levels become much quicker when you already know what’s ahead and they are generally small. The only collectibles to be worried about are coins that can be scooped up again with ease too, usually placed in clear visible areas and only occasionally asking you to do a little platforming to get to if they’re not on the main path. Some enemies like the potion factory workers also pack weapons that turn you into slugs and immediately make you lose and they certainly would be more annoying if progress took a good degree of time. Shrek 2 mitigates this though, able to make advancing require a bit of thought at first, but once you know what you’re doing, repeating it isn’t painful if you have to.

Amidst the simple but still engaging enough team-focused puzzling and platforming there are a few more shifts in design. There are only two boss battles, both more about survival than active participation. Puss in Boots varies up how he attacks at least during his turn as a boss, the player actually needing to pay attention a good bit to avoid being killed by him. The final boss battle though is dodging a fairly basic attack pattern for a set amount of time, and while this survival idea is also used for moments like protecting a giant gingerbread man from falling cream, there it is a way to give an endpoint to a minigame styled stage. The final boss ends up a bit of a weak fight since you can mostly stand in place and jump as necessary to win, although at least the stage prior does a good job of being one last test of teamwork that almost counts as a first part to the fight due to its framing.

There are some actual minigames in Shrek 2 on GBA if you manage to find a leprechaun hiding off the beaten path. Each character has a unique one but they’re pretty plain, Shrek needing to keep the three blind mice aloft by moving a mushroom but getting too far in it seems hard to set up. Donkey just needs to bounce on a moving spring, and Gingy’s has him tossing candy canes up trying to hit flying pumpkins but not fairies and the right rhythm can trivialize it. Puss gets a decent one where you need to jump between ropes while dodging fire and Shrek later gets a survival focused one involving avoiding archer arrows once he gets his sword, but the payout for these is minimal so its hard to commit to even the better ones in search of a high score. Depending on your performance you’ll usually get some sort of healing item from the leprechaun that ranges in potency, but he might also give you a clover that complete negates one incoming attack while equipped. Equipped items are a small thing in Shrek 2, this being the way you carry important thing like keys but it also helps the game avoid stagnation before Puss in Boots arrives. Equipping a fairy gives you longer jumps, equipping the magic shield lets you walk past immovable dangers this thorny thickets, and a ghost power-up prevents you from being noticed in certain mild stealth segments like the searchlights in prison. By having these crop up back when it was just Shrek and Donkey, the interactions needed to progress could be a bit more varied and their continued presence after helps the game manage a consistently decent puzzle platforming experience with few sizeable flaws to hold it back.

THE VERDICT: While it starts simple and has a few little moments of blind jumps or very basic play, Shrek 2 on GBA mostly manages to be an alright time thanks to its focus on its teamwork focused puzzles. Once Puss in Boots joins the group with a more flexible skill set than Shrek and Donkey the game starts putting together levels that require a bit of thought to complete or timed challenges where you need to move quickly and properly to succeed. Unexceptional minigames and a weak final boss fight mean it is sometimes lacking in excitement, but the levels that do take advantage of the cast’s differences or the equippable items manage to make the game lightly engaging throughout.

And so, I give Shrek 2 for Game Boy Advance…

An OKAY rating. Usually when Puss in Boots or Gingy are headlining a level you can expect a level that pushes back against you either with more involved platforming or a timer to give these capable characters more interesting things to do, and when they’re rolled into a group setting they allow for the more complex stages to contain some better-designed puzzles. Things still remain relatively accessible overall but you do need to think and nail little moments like jumping right with Puss in Boots to avoid an archer while the rope you’re on keeps trying to slide you away from the area he’s guarding. It is a bit unfortunate Shrek himself is a rather basic participant and Gingy’s speedy jump makes it a little easy to miss your target if you aren’t careful, but the sum of the playable characters is more than their individual contributions and Shrek 2 does a decent job varying up the action as you progress through the film’s events. If it wanted to do more than it only needed to continue iterating in the way it already seemed to be doing fairly well at, but sometimes it does seem to settle into something too simple to really enjoy like some of the minigames and the final boss fight. The somewhat plain early stages do also weigh on it a little, the game not having as much time to really explore the full group dynamic because it takes a bit to get there and still has a few gimmick stages in the back half that split the team up, but Shrek 2 doesn’t really settle into anything bland for long and you will find yourself doing something a bit more interesting soon after the small dips into less exciting ideas.

Shrek 2 on GBA is a much cleaner experience than Shrek 2 over on home consoles although that game certainly has it beat in general creativity and content variety. However, the focused action found here does it a few favors and the game’s slow but steady innovations on the team-focused level navigation leaves it with few outright dull spots, although beyond a few Puss and Gingy moments it still lacks anything major to really reel a player in. Shrek 2 on GBA holds together and builds off its basic idea well enough to keep you occupied for its short run length, though perhaps with more deviation from the film’s events it could have concocted more moments that stand out rather than it just being a fine experience overall.