The Shrekoning: Shrek the Third (PS2)

After the first two Shrek films released to high praise and high sales, the Shrek film franchise appeared to be on a roll. Dreamworks seemed to grow cocky after the second film’s success though, the slowly growing animation studio announcing a third, fourth, and fifth movie in the same month that Shrek 2 hit theaters. However, that fifth film never materialized, the Shrek brand began to quiet down, and most people now look back at the entire franchise as a joke as if the first two films hadn’t been quality productions. The reason for this decline rests on the shoulders on the third Shrek movie, Shrek the Third taking the surly ogre’s adventures in a lukewarm direction. There was some attempt to have it continue his character development, the movie about Shrek suddenly being made king and seeking out a replacement when he can’t handle the responsibilities only to learn he will soon be coming a father as well. However, it seemed more interested in making a bunch of jokes about high school with a medieval twist, introducing a quirky-for-the-sake-of-it twist on Merlin, and seemingly had little idea of how to raise the stakes beyond recycling old villains and having a mostly disconnected examination of the fairy tale princesses as depicted in the Shrek universe. The decline of the Shrek brand had begun, and almost as if video game developers has sensed the same, the slow climb towards quality was suddenly reversed when it came time to adapt the latest Shrek film into a video game.

Shrek the Third on PlayStation 2 follows the events of the film while inventing a few extra scenes to give it more room for action. In a video game setting it’s a bit easier to get away with the princesses performing a prison break even though even in the context of the game it also struggles to justify itself narratively, but it does give you time to play as the two characters unique to that portion of the film: Princess Fiona and a surprise playable performance of the relatively minor Sleeping Beauty character. Shrek is the main star of the adventure though and the one you’ll play as most, having to fight his way through that fantasy twist on high school but also needing to tackle a band of pirates and fight evil puppets in a toy shop. The swashbuckling feline Puss in Boots is given some time to fight his way through an Evil Queen’s castle, the replacement heir Shrek is seeking out becomes playable with the future king Arthur needing to perform some trials of worthiness first on an icy mountaintop, but while you do get to briefly play as Donkey you’ll find Shrek’s wisecracking best friend to mostly be present in cutscenes. The video game does mean the characters at least get some more focus on them both when it comes to the band of villains the film rushes through and the cluster of characters it can’t spend long shining a spotlight on, but it’s not like the extra time makes the slightly expanded story more engaging.

All of the playable characters play pretty similarly, having quick attacks as well as more powerful strikes. Most of the time when you encounter an enemy you only really need to repeatedly press the quick attacks and they’ll be easily handled, but if they have a shield a strong attack can shatter it so you can take care of them properly. Sleeping Beauty does get an interesting replacement for strong attacks though, as if you can keep her safe and hold the strong attack button she’ll yawn and nearby enemies doze off so you can better deal with them since her basic attacks aren’t as powerful as other characters. Every character does have one unique special move you build up by collecting fairy dust from the environment or beating baddies, Sleeping Beauty again the most creative with her flirting move that turns enemies against each other but the attacks of other characters are certainly more practical. Fiona will do a powerful kick that can also be used to move blocks for some mild puzzling, Arthur’s sword beam can hit far ahead of him, but Shrek and Donkey deal damage pretty plainly and Puss in Boots’s is just a stun that works like Sleeping Beauty’s yawn but instantaneous.

Puss is given a double jump so his levels can focus a bit more on vertical climbs and quick platforming and Shrek’s ability to lift objects means he sometimes hits a roadblock he needs to make a workaround for, but this action game mostly focuses on moving forward and easily dispatching any foes who come within arm’s reach. With its shallow fighting system this does wear thin quickly, but if enemies are stunned you can pull off finishing moves that are meant to be flashy but often seem incredibly unceremonious. Shrek will lightly slap someone’s face a few times before pushing them over or lightly kick out their feet under them, the game in general having an issue with the fighting feeling like it lacks any impact and thus making the easy battles even unsatisfying from a spectacle angle. Captain Hook does at least have a fun song to accompany his fight, although like most boss fights in the game it comes up short in the actual battle side of things. His is more focused on having regular enemies rush in and fight you instead and even the final boss leans on that some, and while the battle with an ice dragon is legitimately different from most fights it still feels rather low energy since you can run around it and keep attacking without much danger from its own attempts to harm you.

Probably one of the better ideas in Shrek the Third to make its plain and often straightforward levels more interesting comes in the form of a set of little objectives you can complete to earn Far Away Pounds. This form of currency can be used to buy extra costumes that even have little perks like quicker fairy dust accumulation and you can also use purchases to flesh out the multiplayer options, so earning them at least might interest some players and they do give you more to engage with in a stage. Some of these will be done over the course of the level either because it’s a required objective or because something like defeating a certain amount of an enemy type is inevitable unless you specifically avoid it, but others like finding hidden collectibles makes you poke around the area more and break apart objects in your hunt. Almost every level has a mission urging you to get a certain amount of finishers in before it’s over that doesn’t really add to the action as you could more easily kill enemies if you didn’t wait for your slow finishers to become available. The actual level design can struggle with feeling small and enclosed even in outdoor areas with the movement forward not impeded by anything too interesting, so breaking up that a bit more with the mission system does help a touch with making the game feel less empty.

There are two moments in the twenty level story mode that do break from the simple format of running forward to fight what’s in your path with a bit of hopping around and puzzle solving that isn’t too involved, that being when you play a minigame called Castle Capture. In Castle Capture you man a catapult and need to destroy a few randomly picked target areas on a far off castle. While they are placed on towers that look easy enough to knock over, squatter ones might not crumble so easily when hit, some might be blocked off by walls or other towers, and the angle of your shot might mean the structure doesn’t completely collapse to the point it counts as destroyed. A time limit exists in the single player version of this, the player needing to eliminate all of the marked towers quickly but the only pressure is how quickly you can get those rocks launched. Pointing the catapult around is easy and the distance a shot travels is determined by holding down a button to build energy, so the substance of the action is trying to figure out how long to hold that button to reach the tower and hopefully hit it at a destructive angle. There are power-ups that float up and down quickly that can be hit for a more destructive shot, but these mostly seem to exist for the game’s multiplayer mode. Eliminating the timer and instead becoming a round-based competition to destroy the competing castle first, multiplayer is perhaps a bit slow for that shift in design but a bit more interesting since you feel your successes and failures more when it might mean the other player gains an edge or loses it. The single-player presence of Castle Capture might just be a tutorial in anticipation of this mild multiplayer mode and the amount of unlockables tied to it seems to suggest the development team was quite happy with the concept, but the pace and simplicity make it one that you probably won’t invest much time in unfortunately.

THE VERDICT: Shrek the Third on PS2 sometimes shows it understands that a bit of variety and creativity could liven up the action, but a few nifty moves on Sleeping Beauty and Puss in Boots leaning more towards platforming don’t really help it climb out of the muck. Shrek the Third is repetitive and unambitious, the missions put in to try and get more engagement out of the player not substantial enough to really save it. You’ll spend most of the game still running around restrictive levels easily slapping enemies away with punches that lack any punch. and when you do find something like Castle Capture that shifts the gameplay format it’s unfortunately about as shallow as the regular action. Shrek the Third already put in a poor performance on the movie screen, so perhaps the game was just following suit with its low quality design as well.

And so, I give Shrek the Third for PlayStation 2…

A BAD rating. The film felt like it was struggling with what it wanted Shrek’s new adventure to be and the game seems to share in that struggle a fair bit. The shallow fighting seems the most present aspect of the game but quickly becomes rote with the new twists to it being specific character abilities that don’t really change it up enough since the fairy dust system means they only crop up on occasion rather than being a defining factor in a character’s fighting style. Level design is often about going down the only available path to fight enemies, but at least some of the missions do mean you take a second to look around and see if there’s an item to grab. Exploration isn’t really a driving factor though with the puzzles and platforming often not asking much out of the player, and while Castle Capture has many of the unlockables tied to it, the fundamentals of that mode feel like they need more variables in play to avoid being a slow uninteractive back and forth. The adventure doesn’t deviate from the core action enough to feel unfocused, but nothing really had the amount of attention that indicates a clear and devoted vision for the game, so much of the game feeling like it is built out of the baseline elements. When new enemy types like witches and evil puppets enter the mix you’re still just slapping them around like you usually do, and while you get a rare moment like the type of witch who raises a barrier, you just hurl an object at her quickly and its back to basic arm swinging until everyone’s down for the count.

Shrek the Third on PS2 will appear to be trying something new in a stage only for the player to realize how little things have truly changed, the already weak systems struggling with so much of the weight of the experience on their shoulders. Glimmers of ideas can help prevent it from growing so repetitive it becomes a chore, but it doesn’t really offer anything to hook the player since the gameplay is bland and mostly just reheated for the next stage even if the setting or character change leads to a mostly minor new element being introduced. Shrek the Third was still under Activision’s banner, but for whatever reason they didn’t seem as interested in trying to make the tie-in game for the third film as solid as many of the ones based around Shrek 2 are. Whatever their reasoning behind letting this slip through, it does look and feel like a clear decline. Shrek the Third is a flawed film, but that doesn’t mean the video game version had to be bad as well, but with the film helping start the turn away from Shrek in public opinion, perhaps even the team behind the game adaptation had no interest in putting in the work for a game based on a weakening brand.