The Shrekoning: Shrek Forever After (DS)

After Shrek the Third dealt a debilitating wound to the Shrek brand, Dreamworks got to work trying to redeem franchise with the fourth film.  Taking an almost self-aware approach to the movie, Shrek Forever After kicks off with the grumpy green ogre Shrek missing the days when he was a strong and fearsome figure who wasn’t bogged down by responsibilities. Even he was longing for the old days of the franchise, and getting wind of this, the contract-obsessed Rumpelstiltskin steps in and exploits that midlife crisis by offering Shrek a single day away from his humdrum life to act like an ogre again. Not paying attention to the fine print, Shrek offers a day from his past in exchange for this day to let loose, only to learn Rumpelstiltskin took the day Shrek was born. Since Shrek could never commit his many heroic deeds that bettered the world if he was never born, the little schemer is able to take over the kingdom of Far Far Away and plunges it into an era of despotic rule. Meeting versions of his friends who went down worse paths without him, Shrek must try and set things right before his single day is done and he disappears from history entirely.

This somewhat darker story with its renewed interest in the character growth of Shrek as he balances his gruffness with his kind heart is not only the plot of the film but of its DS adaptation as well, the video game even getting a group of vocal imitators to ensure there is plenty of spoken dialogue during the cutscenes, during the action, and even during the tutorial, although not many of the stand-ins for the film’s vocal talent do a very convincing job. Still, while you will hear a fair bit of the action lines repeated too many times, it does make it easy enough to keep track of the game’s simplified version of the film’s events. It does have a bit of an issue trying to pepper in its actual levels along the spine of the plot though, the action in them sometimes feeling disconnected like when Shrek loses confidence and thinks he shouldn’t help a band of ogres lead a resistance against Rumpelstiltskin he runs off and just does a long unrelated platforming stage before changing his mind. Still, with much of Shrek Forever After focusing on how the world would be without Shrek, the game does make sure you get some time to learn about Princess Fiona’s turn towards a warrior’s life or Donkey’s loneliness since no one would put up with his joke telling in this alternate world.

Most of the gameplay in Shrek Forever After takes the form of platforming stages with little puzzles to bar your progress, but there’s an odd choice made in their design. Shrek is given a double jump and while many levels have little stretches of transitional ground to get you to the next puzzle or combat encounter, it often decides to put a little jump from one platform to another during these moments. These require you to double jump to cross with perhaps a tiny bit of timing and it isn’t particularly challenging to do so, but it is spaced in such a way you can mess it up and die to something that barely registered as a true impediment to progress. Most of the time you can breeze through this arbitrary platforming to moments where it can actually feel like proper gameplay, the player needing to explore areas to find small levers, time jumps to avoid being stuck on a crumbling platform, or needing to quickly get from one area to another to hit a series of switches. This probably makes up the bulk of the adventure with real puzzles coming in second place, but the platforming does struggle with one consistent issue during the adventure that even complicates those moments of jumping over pointless gaps: the camera.

You have no way to adjust your viewing angle of the third-person action and there are quite a few moments where you’ll be at the mercy of the automatic choices the game makes. Not only can this make backtracking difficult even when necessary, but it can make forward movement tougher than needed if it’s not showing your desired landing spot well. There was even a moment where every step forward I took caused it to constantly zoom out for some reason until the level was hard to make out in the large white void it now occupied, but for the most part it is thankfully slightly uncooperative rather than an antagonizing force that would push the platforming into frustrating territory. Getting around is usually easy, but that camera adds the occasional unwelcome complication during such simple navigation.

While sometimes Shrek Forever After practically makes a puzzle out of its level navigation as you need to figure out how to hit the switches in the allotted time, there are moments where the game does try to more directly challenge your brain over reflexes and speed. One of the most common methods is placing a group of colored blocks in front of you, Shrek needing to push them onto their matching floor tiles but only able to shove them along the little paths connecting them. This box pushing puzzle often feels more like it’s about investing the time in moving things rather than really needing to think too much about how to arrange them, and the same could be said about a few of the lever flipping challenges. Sometimes you’ll find a cluster of levers that all need to be activated, but flipping certain ones will deactivate others. Learning which ones do so is purely a trial and error affair, but they’re often so simple you can likely flip them all and then go back and flip the deactivated ones and you’ll have finished the puzzle without really thinking. The game does whip out some legitimately complicated puzzles to test you like a portion where you need to keep changing which buttons are held down with boxes to make bridges to reach other buttons to continue the puzzle and near the end of the game you begin flipping levers that alternate which colored pillars are up or down, although the colored pillar puzzles do take a bit for it to evolve away from simply flipping them any time you find one.

The puzzles do probably do a better job of keeping you occupied than the battles with enemies though, Shrek Forever After featuring no boss fights and many of its regular enemies are pushovers who struggle to even be a little pesky. Witches, knights, peasants, and living trees are the only enemies found in the game and besides some of the witches dropping pumpkins from above they all fight with the same approach of heading towards you to smack you around. To be fair, that is usually going to be how you fight back against them, although your basic punch combo that could have easily killed them has an odd feature where it lightly pushes enemies back so you also need to lightly move forward if you want every attack to hit. You are given a belly flop attack to damage enemies around you and a roar that can stun them for a bit if you’re being ganged up on, but besides occasionally complicating time sensitive sections by potentially distracting you, the fights are so simple they can start to overstay their welcome when the game tries to make a section focused solely on beating back a group of baddies.

The game does mostly keep its attention on the puzzle platforming, gradually adding in new ideas like fire vents to avoid while wind tries to shove you into them and even a brief maze section where you need to adjust the available paths inside it to escape. To try and give you more to do in the levels the game does pepper in collectibles like the hourglasses that go towards buying Shrek new costumes like a set of armor or swim trunks, but it’s things like the mementos, crystal balls, and scrapbook stickers that usually require a little work to get. Mementos are pieced together in a little upgrade screen to increase things like your punching strength and health and the scrapbook stickers can be arranged into little scenes, but despite being hidden better than other things the crystal balls don’t really seem to contribute anything despite the game even saying they count towards full completion of the game.

Levels can sometimes contain minigames as well, the game featuring some touch screen interactions that come in a variety of different stripes. The least interesting ones that almost feel they exist due to some sort of publisher mandate are small moments where you need to do some incredibly basic task like pull a chain or sign Shrek’s name on the touchscreen. Some of these involve the microphone instead but they feel like interactions for the sake of it rather than anything too interesting or really involved, although having one of them be Donkey licking a pile of waffles at least means there’s an oddly humorous one in the bunch. Some better conceived minigames will appear in the middle of levels and involve playing as Shrek’s friends, although oddly enough you can play as Fiona during these before Shrek meets her in plot. If you meet Donkey in a stage you’ll briefly be asked to kick apart the crates around him, Fiona needs to do a small set of timed button presses to break down training poles, and Puss in Boots scales the side of a wall to grab items on it. These mostly pay out with a scrapbook sticker and a lot of hourglasses, although there are also a lot of health pickups that appear to make this less worthwhile since you’ll get more than you could possibly need as a reward and they can make it harder to break the right object containing the scrapbook pickup. The timers do eventually get so tight you might not complete every part of these, but luckily since death only sets you back to a very recent checkpoint you can just have Shrek die if you care to retry that portion.

Most of those minigames feel like busywork or worse though, but if you find the four minigame tokens in the game’s levels you can actually find some actually well-conceived minigames you can only play from the level select menu. The weakest is probably the Gingerbread Man’s game where you collect lollipops to use as weapons against incoming animal crackers who are only really dangerous when their number is high. The three others actually build up to be legitimate challenges though as you unlock their higher difficulties, and their designs are a lot more engaging than slowly crawling across a wall or kicking boxes. Donkey’s dedicated game has the player placing random path tiles to try and give Donkey a path from his starting point through all the waffles on the grid to the ending, the scarcity of straightforward pieces and time crunch making this actually require some thought. Fiona’s is again similar to a rhythm game, but unlike her pole breaking game, her dedicated challenge is to try and outscore other ogres in what the game oddly enough calls Target Practice. Rings appear on the screen and move about, and once they intersect and turn white you need to tap them to unleash an attack. The power varies depending on your timing and you need to outscore the opposing ogre to move onto the next opponent, the rings moving in different ways to make timing your attack a solid reflex challenge where it is easy to get psyched out and slip up. The now portly Puss in Boots is dreaming of things to pamper himself in his more substantial minigame, and to assist him you swipe upwards to launch him towards items floating by to try and grab as many as you can. Hitting multiple items builds up a multiplier to your score for that lunge and the goal is to hit a certain point threshold that soon requires solid timing for when you release the cat towards the top screen, but Rumpelstiltskin heads serve as dangerous blockers so you can’t just swipe wildly and expect to win. As you might guess by the time I’ve devoted to explaining them, these minigames are probably the best conceived part of this game despite their small part of it, and it’s strange these are optional games that require finding a token to play when the main adventure could have broken up some of its monotony with these instead of rehashed puzzles or pointless jumping trials.

THE VERDICT: Shrek Forever After for DS does do a fair bit to try and keep the player active, but the actions they are involved in are hardly engaging. Platforming, when it isn’t held back by bad camera angles, could do with some more energy and stakes besides trying to outpace some timers on occasion, and while there are some decent puzzles added to your level navigation at times, it does lean on rehashes of its block and lever concepts too often despite them already being uninteresting to start. Battles are basic to the point they barely provide anything beyond light impediment and the minigames encountered during levels are similarly too simple to excite, but some optional content like well hidden crystal balls and the engaging level menu minigames do provide little moments of fun amidst the monotony.

And so, I give Shrek Forever After for Nintendo DS…

A BAD rating. Shrek Forever After on DS has 18 levels and if you’re looking around for extras they can take usually around 10 to 15 minutes to complete each, but their lack of interesting activities often made me want to take breaks between them. While you do go through some different level types like a lava-filled castle and a swamp, later settings include a different type of swamp and a different castle which certainly doesn’t help with making the areas feel distinct from each other. Add in the repeating puzzle concepts, low amount of enemies who don’t ask for much from you beyond fist flailing, and moments of platforming that feel like filler, and Shrek Forever After is a game that’s easy to get tired of quickly even though the camera is the only thing that doesn’t seem to be working as intended. The game does do a fair bit with timers to add some energy to brief moments of play and it is a treat when something like the bridge puzzle injects some more involved interaction into the affair, but too much time is spent with content that is too basic. The level menu minigames show they did have a good idea of how to make a simple concept into something more engaging, but Shrek Forever After banks instead on things like the colored block puzzle more than the quick and exciting action of something like Puss in Boots’s dream or the reflex challenge found in Fiona’s Target Practice.

While the film was trying to rejuvenate the Shrek brand by returning to a more personal story for Shrek, over on the Nintendo DS it didn’t seem like Shrek was going to come out of the rut the Shrek the Third inspired games placed him in. Shrek Forever After for DS decides its priorities are more on seemingly randomly changing Shrek portraits on the top screen rather than continuing to really innovate in the puzzle platforming content you’re actually engaging with, and while it does roll out some new ideas over time, it also falls back on very basic play that didn’t do much when it was first introduced. Shrek Forever After for DS really does feel like it finds itself as another run of the mill low quality licensed game, an unfortunate fate for a franchise that could have used every bit of possible love it could scrounge up after Shrek the Third shook things up in the wrong way.