by:	November 20, 2008

Madgascar 2 Escape 2 Africa is a game based on the movie by Dreamworks pictures published by Activision and developed by Tags for Bob. The game follows the adventures of Alex the lion, Gloria the hippo, Marty the zebra, Melman the giraffe, King Julien, Maurice, and the penguins as they attempt to make it to NYC. Of course everything goes wrong and the gang ends up crash landing a plane they fixed up in Africa. The game loosely follows the plot of the movie, only really hinting at it during incredibly pixilated cutscense that are narrated by King Julien. King Julien is definitely the best part of the game.

Visually the game gets the job done, with plenty of bright colors but it doesn’t quite stack up to Kung-Fu Panda game based off of the Dreamworks movie of the same name. It isn’t even half as fun as that for that matter. Visually they have the style from the movie down, but it lacks in great detail. ME2A is incredibly bland and it is obvious that they developed this with PS2 in mind also. With a few effects added in for Xbox 360 and an extra thing of shine, the entire thing is rendered in full 3D with very few backdrops, and the backdrops blur out of focus. These are some decent touches, but they aren’t enough to save the game from looking like it could have been made on something like PlayStation 2 four years ago.

The game begins, as essentially a tutorial and a series of minigames, like racing and bowling. However most of the game is various missions and mini games anyways, unless you are the Lion, which involves a few more platform elements. As the hippo you can swim under water which if you go under the water with another character you die and restart, she has the butt bash, she can ram into things. With the giraffe you use your head to head butt things such as moles, and you can glide by spinning really fast. At one point he is teetering on a boulder. The lion does most of the traditional platforming, jumping around. The zebra kicks stuff around in more of a shooting gallery setup. It loosely follows the story of the movie.

This game is definitely only for the younger crowd I couldn’t see parents and children a like enjoy. It has a four-player element in which you can engage in a series of minigames such as playing slots, bowling, racing, and more.

The game isn’t very instructional, sometimes it will want to do things automatically, and not respond as well as they could. This can work to the benefit of kids playing it in some cases, but when I let my little sister play it for a little bit, she even got frustrated at the lack of control the game gives you. The beginning of the game you think you are playing a tutorial or a refresher course to understand the past game, but really the entire game feels like a series of incoherent minigames, and tutorials. It can be fun at times and it is great to have an idea of what you are doing with a few control instructions but it is overall poorly executed.

The voices are not of Ben Stiller, Chris Rock, Jada Pinkett-Smith, taking away from the authenticity of the experience, and the voice actors used don’t even sound like them. The only one that sounds dead-on is King Julien.

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The game is a little pricey retailing at $50 especially in today’s economy, so at $40 it would have been better especially during the tight Christmas season. This game will be great for the much younger crowd thanks to the basic nature, and all the bright colors, but it is still only a rental at best. Your kid would probably have more fun with a Madagascar 2 toy out of a Happy Meal anyways.

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