The Incredibles (PS2)
Up until 2004 every Pixar film would have a tie-in game released around the same time, so it’s no surprise The Incredibles would receive the same treatment as well. However, the films that were being adapted into action games before it weren’t quite the same fit for the genre. Sure you could make the adventures of fish, toys, and bugs into action adventure games with a little thought, but The Incredibles’s premise of a superhero family facing off with actual dangerous foes makes it sound like the tie-in game would have a lot of the work done just by the premise.
Interestingly enough, The Incredibles on PlayStation 2 does try to adapt more than just the present day antics of the super-powered family. The movie begins with scenes of the super strong Mr. Incredible’s early superhero antics as does the game, the early conflict against an evil mime named Bomb Voyage making up the first three levels and the game even making a full-fledged stage out of the scene in the movie where Mr. Incredible saves people from a burning building in disguise after public sentiment turned against superpowered beings. It was certainly a wise decision to give us this slice of varied action near the start, because as soon as Mr. Incredible is called to fight runaway robots on a tropical island, the settings for most of the adventure start to only really include the jungle, similar enemy bases, and a few lava themed spaces.
The Incredibles isn’t just about its burly front man though. The film focuses a lot on how the family attempts to fit in as they have to hide their powers and later get to embrace them more when a villain named Syndrome enacts a plot involving the robots fought on the island, but the game makes some interesting choices in how it tells that story. Actual scenes from the computer animated film are included to bridge together levels, this working well when it’s doing things like setting up special scenarios like when the daughter Violet and son Dash combine their powers for a stage, but then it also decides to keep in the small subplot where the father is sneaking off to do heroics and his wife starts to think he’s cheating on her. The baby Jack-Jack is entirely absent which makes some sense considering the focus on action, but on the other hand Syndrome, the main villain of the film, is barely present. You fight his robots and henchmen but he’s thrown out of the plot unceremoniously and so he’s never directly confronted nor is his backstory properly explored in the game’s retelling of events. They do manage to get the voice actors for Dash and Violet in and they do decent work, but Samuel L. Jackson’s role as the ice-themed hero Frozone, despite being rather minimal in the course of the game’s events, is elevated as he is given plenty of lines for simple things like navigating menus that add a bit more life to the usually dry functionality of such things.
The removed scenes and details likely seem less strange if you had played the game without the movie’s context and since it released a little earlier than most people could have seen it that might have been the case for some players. For the actual action featured in The Incredibles though, things aren’t quite as strange. Much of the action is rather plain, and that might be partly because Mr. Incredible is asked to carry much of it on his shoulders. While you do play as different members of the family at certain points, the father is playable in 11 of the 18 stages and despite his costume changes, you aren’t going to be getting any new skills along the way. Mr. Incredible, also known as Bob Parr, relies primarily on simple punches for battle, and while he can pick up and throw things the efficacy of this usually swaps between not worth the trouble or absolutely required to have a hope of damaging that target. There’s quite a few points where you might be standing around waiting for a boss or flying foe to finally spit out the item you need to throw back at them, and the game does enjoy reusing boss fights for Bob’s battles. The big black Omnidroids can at least be lightly damaged by punching their legs at parts although they’ll eventually jump out of reach for more waiting on when it’s safe to throw something at them, but the regular henchmen are often just about running around and clobbering them while occasionally mixing in a super-powered punch if its available to clear foes more quickly or deal more damage.
Mr. Incredible’s combat slips into that realm where it’s repetitive fairly early on but the game doesn’t really start to overdo things until later in the adventure. Some levels near the end involve constant combat including multiple encounters with the giant robots within the same stage, and while you are fairly strong you will probably be worn down by incoming fire and so if you don’t damage enemies quickly enough the amount of foes can whittle you down and force a retry of a long combat section. To try and alleviate some of the fighting system’s plainness most levels starring Mr. Incredible have the good sense to pepper in platforming, puzzles, or special segments. One level involves Mr. Incredible hanging onto a flying kid and dodging objects, some segments he rips out a turret to shoot down scores of enemies, and some little challenges like avoiding dangerous barriers or needing to smash apart generators mean sometimes Bob’s portions have enough variety to break up the onset of monotony, but the rest of the family aren’t really improvements.
Bob’s wife Helen, also known as Elastigirl, gets three levels, and with both slightly unreliable platforming gimmicks and an odd vocal impression of her original voice actress her levels always feel a little off. Her stretchy arms are sometimes used to latch onto objects although the game can sometimes struggle to make that ability available unless you mess around with your positioning and camera for a fair bit. Her fighting on the other hand can end up remarkably simple to the point it’s almost mindless. While you have close range strikes and even a few little combos where Helen takes on different shapes or stretches differently to fight, it’s often much wiser to use her stretch punch and pummel them swiftly and efficiently from afar. It’s not like this is a weak or slow method either and the game often positions foes rather far off before they run in to fight so you can do some good damage with this method. In close-range it’s usually riskier anyway as the game is unafraid to throw a lot of baddies at you at once whether you’re Mr. Incredible or Elastigirl, this being one reason you can be whittled down since the number means they’ll probably land some hits before you can make some space. Helen’s super move is at least a crowd attack good for giving her breathing room, but her fights will likely boil down to the long-range punches or needing to shove off a group so playing as her isn’t that exciting.
Violet and Dash move from monotonous to some legitimate problems with their portions though. Dash’s aren’t quite as extreme, the young speedster’s two big levels involving him running at super speed forward and you need to guide him to avoid dangers. While he can survive a small stumble, any contact with an object in front of you is an instant death and reset to the last checkpoint. There are moments where Dash will run through a tunnel and need to be able to go up the walls and run across the ceiling or other similarly flashy maneuvers to avoid collisions, but the game can sometimes make controlling such actions oddly touchy so it’s easy to crash because the movement wasn’t smooth enough. The hazards during the regular level are pretty easy to hit as well since you need to outpace a timer on top of surviving, but the checkpoint system eliminates some of the frustration so it ends up more something you retry until you know it well enough to beat it rather than something that will take too long to complete.
Violet’s single solo level on the other hand is a mess. The shy teenager’s invisibility powers are used for a stealth segment where you sneak past guards who will instantly kill you if they can land a shot on you. Turning invisible is a limited time deal and it needs time to refill between uses, but the issue isn’t that it has a short timer so much as that invisibility isn’t as useful in avoiding detection as you’d think. Sometimes an enemy will know you’re there if you’re close enough to them, but if you think that’s a sound-related thing then it’s odd that other times you can walk right by their side and they won’t know you’re there. It might be they have a vision cone for seeing you if visible and the vision cone shrinks down but still exists when you are invisible, but whatever the reasoning you are sneaking through many tight spaces and the detection range of individual troops seems to vary. It’s just as much trial and error as Dash’s levels but with less consistency on the rules at play and fewer checkpoints as well to make it more aggravating, the major upside being you only do this level type once.
The game has a few secrets to find hidden around in areas off the beaten path or requiring quick action during another segment, but some of these are restricted to the Battle Arena mode earned for beating the game. This just throws either Bob or Helen in an arena for waves of enemies to appear and fight and is even less thrilling than regular battles since there’s nothing but attack mashing and the gradual wear down from the abundance of foes to focus on. The story at least has a few more gimmicky sections like where Violet uses a barrier power to make a ball for Dash to roll around in for a level with different movement physics and less general danger since you can bowl over foes, but the bland extra mode unlocked only really demands attention if you want to see all the concept art.
THE VERDICT: A less than incredible film adaptation even though a super powered family feels like it could have been a perfect fit for an action game, The Incredibles on PlayStation 2 just leans too hard on Mr. Incredible’s bland henchman and bot battles to really excite players. Sometimes it will break away from the shallow fighting system for some level navigation challenges or brief gameplay shifts to alleviate that issue, but it starts leaning more and more into repeating boss fights and huge groups of enemies the deeper you get, and when you do get some time to play as Helen, Dash, or Violet, their gameplay types are often serviceable at best and aggravating at worst. Using clips from the film and having Samuel L. Jackson provide color commentary at points was a nice touch, but Pixar’s super family end up in a game they’d loathe for how plain and restrictive the action ends up being.
And so, I give The Incredibles for PlayStation 2…
A BAD rating. The interesting thing about the Mr. Incredible segments is at first they do have a fairly decent balance down for when the action starts and when the other forms of play crop up. You’ll fight a batch of baddies, then need to do something like make your way through a dangerous platforming challenge, solve a quick puzzle, or briefly engage with a gimmick like the turret segments. The deeper in you go the game starts to feel more like it’s contriving reasons to move Bob from battle section to battle section and the reuse of the giant robots and swarms of enemies starts to wear down the averageness into outright bad play. Helen’s stretchy punch is almost too effective and eliminates some of the danger but close-range fights aren’t much better, the game needing a better middle-ground where you need to swap between strategies, but it would likely mess that up in the same way Mr. Incredible sometimes needs to just wait to be able to grab and throw things back at foes he can’t hurt otherwise. Dash’s segments probably just needed some tightening up or some leniency so that crashing in those finicky tunnel segments wouldn’t be so bothersome, but Violet’s stealth section is definitely the game’s low point. You already need to watch enemy patrols to make sure you don’t turn visible while slipping through but then the henchmen can sometimes detect you anyway based on unclear parameters for how they can spot you.
If it was just a collection of different gameplay types then maybe The Incredibles could have squeaked by as an okay experience. Nothing really excels, but if you space things out well then they wouldn’t have time to get stale. You’d still have some poorly realized ideas like Violet’s sneaking section to work out, but the game does attempt new ideas and for a while that’s a solid way to keep the player on board. Making full use of the superpowered family is one of the tantalizing ideas for such a game adaptation but it’s done in half-measures and more focus is given to the rapidly rote battles as Mr. Incredible, so despite having a more fitting source material for an action game than most Pixar properties of the time, The Incredibles on PlayStation 2 still ended up a less than thrilling licensed game.