July 16, 2007 - As I write this review, I have to ask a question: What is the point? Sure, I could trash this game, point out all of its faults, but what well would that do? Everyone who intends to purchase this game for their kids (or themselves) has already made up their minds about their purchasing decision. That's the beauty of the licensed property for a game developer. As long as the property in question is popular enough, you can be completely creatively bankrupt and cut as many corners in game design as you like, and still be assured bucket loads of money. However, occasionally a licensed game will rise above lazy game design and actually provide a great gaming experience.

Unfortunately, Shrek the Third is not that game; not by a long shot. StT is as weak as licensed kiddie games get. It's a boring, shallow experience that features none of the whimsy and hilarity of the films. Sure, the game features some rather impressively voiced sound-a-likes and a handful of situations from the movie, but it doesn't amount to anything resembling a rich gaming experience.

StT plays kind of like God of War on valium. You begin the game as Shrek, and right away you are placed in a small room surrounded by guys you have to beat up while Donkey gives you "helpful" advice. Once your enemies are defeated they usually drop coins and blue orbs which give you special powers. Collect enough blue orbs to fill your meter, and you can perform various devastating attacks on your enemies.

Throughout the course of this very short five hour adventure, you play as other characters such as Puss in Boots and Fiona, but the gameplay never evolves beyond the basic template set forth by that first room. Run forward, beat a few people to a pulp, collect coins, and move on. Combat has nearly zero depth to it. There are strong and weak attacks, and occasionally you're given the opportunity to commit a finishing move on your opponent. Most of the finishers are pretty lame and are only worth doing to get achievement points in the 360 version. Forget about any sort of varied combos, as mashing the weak attack button over and over is usually enough to get you out of any sort of jam.

The closest the game comes to breaking the monotony of pushing two buttons to beat everyone up and breaking stuff is by instituting a variety of mind-numbing jumping puzzles. The jumping puzzles in this game are extremely frustrating for two reasons. One, your character's motion always feels slippery and imprecise, meaning that making any sort of precision movement is an exercise in futility.

The other reason is the game's absolutely terrible camera. You're never given any sort of control whatsoever on the camera, and it always seems positioned in the worst possible place to judge distances and angles for your jump. Furthermore, the camera constantly positions itself so that large pillars, crates, or simply awkward angles obscure your view. Not only does this effectively ruin all the jumping puzzles in the game, but it also results in a lot of cheap hits from off-screen enemies. Make no mistake, if this camera system had the chance, it would kill you and everyone you care about.

The game also demands that you smash every single crate, box, and statue that you come across in order to collect a myriad of various trinkets and coins. Oh, the collecting... Now, my memory of the movie might be a little fuzzy, but I don't seem to recall Shrek being a money-grubbing Scrooge. Then again, I don't remember him running around indiscriminately laying the beat down on every single person he came across either.

Collecting the various trinkets allows you to unlock a large collection of goodies, but none are all that interesting. After collecting 12,500 coins, you can unlock easy mode. EASY MODE! By the time you've collected that many coins, you'll already have gotten through half the game on the normal difficulty. You can also unlock new costumes, extremely lame multiplayer games, and commentary tracks for certain levels. The commentary is a neat idea, but they get the two most annoying voices (Gingerbread Man and Pinocchio) to do the voice over. Not only that, but usually the commentary will end before you've even cleared the first room in the level. The saying goes: "a penny for your thoughts"; not two levels worth of swag!