Sea Monsters - A Prehistoric Adventure (Nintendo DS) - Review by Chris

Introduction

Taking a film and turning it into a game isn't an uncommon sight. For every big blockbuster film released, a game usually follows and more often than not, they fail to live up to the quality of the film. More uncommon are documentaries being turned into games yet recently, we've seen an influx of small developers picking up the rights to said documentaries and turning them into video games. One such developer, Atomic Planet, is doing just that with Sea Monsters: A Prehistoric Adventure, based on a CG animated documentary for National Geographic. Unfortunately, the game doesn't quite manage to be as interesting as the title suggests and runs out of breath quicker than it should do.

Gameplay

Following the documentary made for the National Geographic, Sea Monsters: A Prehistoric Adventure aims to showcase the lives of various creatures which inhabited the planet's seas long before the coming of man. While the content itself makes for an interesting documentary and interesting educational experience, these things have been completely forgotten when creating the game. In the game, you play as one of 6 sea creatures swimming around and living in the deep seas. Yet besides a vague allusion as to some goal, you as the gamer are left virtually in the dark as to what it is you need to be doing.

Three life bars are presented to you on the touch screen: one for stamina, one for oxygen and one for health. While the game gives very little in the way of information about what it is you should be doing, for the most part your goal is to swim around to find your way out of a certain place, find fossils or take on specific prey, all the while maintaining these three life bars. To do so, you'll need to regularly surface for air or eat smaller fish. But the process becomes tedious as swimming into too deep water results in your bars depleting quickly and so you'll have to replenish them far more often than you want.

Swimming around the environments, the only way to progress sees you having to take on predator challenges to gain fossils or uncover fossils by searching. Doing so slowly unlocks the 6 sea creatures which will eventually become available yet the objectives remain the same: vague and boring, with plenty of swimming and further delving into the depths looking for fossils. The creatures themselves do have special abilities, such as being able to dig or break rocks, and utilising these is necessary to finding all of the fossils hidden in the game. There are challenges that await you, which you access through a hub area but this area is so confusing to navigate that just getting into an event is difficult enough and more often than not, you'll opt out of bothering after spending ages just looking for them.

If you endeavour to find all of the challenges and fossils, the game will last you a good couple of hours but with the gameplay falling incredibly flat so quickly, the prospect for anyone to go that far is unreasonable as any gamer, regardless of age, will sooner switch out the game for something more interesting.

Controls

A mixture of touch screen and button based controls are put to use here in a similar way to first person shooters on the console. You'll use the d-pad to strafe left or right and move forwards or backwards while moving the stylus on the touch screen to change direction or pitch. Making use of the shoulder buttons, you can look on to prey as well as reposition the camera, a necessary feat seeing as the camera doesn't always keep up when you're trying to take down some prey. It works well for the most part but is at times too sluggish for manoeuvring around the environments or for keeping up with prey.

Graphics

Visually, the game is created in full 3D giving you open environments to explore, populated with other sea creatures. At a glance, the over visual presentation looks good but look closer and you'll see that things are very basic and an all too often rehashing of prior environmental elements takes place more often than it should do. Environments are open for exploration but their design lacks any ingenuity and textures for the rocks and the 2D work are extremely blocky. This latter issue becomes more apparent when you head above the water for air as any transparency that the water should have disappears and is replaced with an off putting blocky texture applied to the surface of the water.

The creature designs harken back to the CG documentary and look good, being of a better quality than the environments they have to swim around in. This crosses over to their animation which looks natural but the same issues of blocky textures and a general lack of polygons make them fall short of being anything more than average. Unfortunately, the game suffers from some severe frame rate issues, more often than not slowly to a crawl rather frequently breaking up the already lacklustre gameplay into some incredibly tedious.

Sound

There is a minimal use of audio throughout the entire package, with little in the way of anything to create an atmosphere or pull you into the experience. The only time you'll experience any audio is when swimming and it's so quiet and unnoticeable that you'll be forgiven for thinking there wasn't anything playing at all.

Dual screen

All of the gameplay takes place on the top screen while the touch screen houses life bars and a sonar screen. It is also used for navigating and as such, the overall game does make decent use of the screens available but the work which has gone into the controls and the sonar pull back the overall quality.

Final comments

An opportunity existed to create a game based on the documentary which would have facilitated a space as an educational experience for children but the end result of Atomic Planet's development cycle is a boring and tedious game which has little right going for it. The gameplay lacks any form of direction, leaving the player all too often clueless about where to go and what to do and continuing this process over the course of a couple of hours, regardless of the inclusion of different creatures, means the game will sooner be ejected from the cart slot than being left in to see what awaits further down the line.

Pro: 3D visuals aren't atrocious
Con: Gameplay becomes monotonous very quickly, presentation is average at best, controls are too sluggish
Final score: 2.9

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