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By Keith B (5th Sep 2007)

Ratatouille, the game, has much to live up to. More or less acclaimed by every major and minor newspaper and magazine in the world (excluding, maybe, Le Monde and L’equipe), the movie has fared extremely well, both commercially and critically. The game, hoping to capitalize on that success, has its work cut out for it.

The game, and the movie, follows the story of Remy, a French rat (oh, how Americans love their bludgeoning allegories) with a penchant for good food and the olfactory powers of a teenager’s mother. Given the job of patrolling his rat pack’s environs for lurking poisons, Remy stumbles into the most famous kitchen in France. There he finds the culturally inappropriately named Linguini, a bumbling busboy who accidentally sullies a pot of soup. In a rash fit, Linguini starts pouring random ingredients into the soup, with little regard for taste (maybe Linguini should have been named Emeril Lagasse). Remy looks on in horror, eventually fixing--and improving-- the soup, to the relief of Linguini, and the approval of the chef. The result is an ongoing partnership between a rodent and a blockhead.

So you are Remy, the most ambitious rat since Richard Nixon, and are looking to become Paris’s greatest chef, a worthy if not entirely commonplace rodent idée fixe. But before striking out to conquer the culinary world--in hopes of meeting your idol, the great Parisian chef Auguste Gusteau--you must endure the bane of the European Commission: the French antipathy for work. So the game begins at a farm, where Remy’s sluggish brother instructs you in the art of living digitally. Here you’ll learn to move, collect, run, climb, and jump - a medley of useful moves thankfully explained in tutorial style.

The resulting gameplay is not only solid, but markedly diverse. There’s nothing really new in Ratatouille--the game is, like all of the most enduring play-to-play title, an admixture of several tasks. Along the way, then, you’ll get to push Linguini around a kitchen, prodding him to live up to your impeccable sous-chef standards. This combined with numerous quick cooking activities--everything from stews to crepes--means a lot of quality time spent in the kitchen. These mini-games often prove something of a highlight, while definitely adding to the game’s replay potential, especially when performed in two- or occasionally four-player mode. The resulting combination offers an exciting, well-integrated balance of Cooking Mama-esque culinary flamboyance, Sonic the Hedgehog�"aghast! another rodent!�"speed, and Mario-esque gaming. More or less, though, Ratatouille is a platformer’s delight, combining all the genre’s usual run-and-get-‘em elements with a few add-on culinary mini-games: the result is an amuse bouche for the gamer’s palate.

The control scheme is conversely good and very, very bad. In one sense, the control scheme is fairly easy to use. A will have you jumping, while B will help you accost strangers. Maybe not the best possible system, but by no means a digital hell. Hands down, the worst feature of the control scheme is an insufferably tedious camera controller, almost incomprehensibly shuttled from its heavenly ordained place on the D pad--much in the way monarchs are chosen and heathens vanquished--to the Nunchuk’s C button. Holding the C button, you’ll be forced to aim the controller at the screen to adjust the camera’s position. If this were only annoying, it would be one thing; but that the C-button camera inhibits, if it doesn’t essentially prohibit, simultaneous dashes, controlled by the nearby but not near enough Z button, is something boarding upon the absurd.

Visually the game generally lives up to Pixar’s visually impeccable standards, more or less mirroring the original. That being said, the game isn’t perfect. Sure, it looks like the movie, but the Wii, time and again, has proven something of the console for visual dullards. (One assumes that when Wii II appears, god knows when, that graphics will be the first thing upgraded.) The gaming environments have a delightfully expansive feel, only improved by their interactivity. But as you scour the kitchen, the odd item here or there stands out worse than a hot dog in your crème brûlée. On closer inspection, lumpy, nearly formless objects populate what from a distant looked like a kitchen verité. As a result, the game looks really good in a superficial sort of way: from a distance and on first sight, it’s downright pretty; but as you work your way through the levels, things start to get clunky, objects just a touch too blurry.

The game’s audioscape is decent, loaded down with humourous voice-overs and pass-the-time music. On occasion, though, those affected French accents can wear pretty thin, reminding us why most people hate the French and why even more people hate people who love the French.

Part of what makes Ratatouille only a good, and not great, game is that it’s developer, Heavy Iron Studios, focused too aggressively on putting out a children’s game. The levels, challenges, and mini-games vacillate between facile to the point insulting and moderately difficult. Gamers of the hardcore ilk will tire quickly of the game, finishing it in maybe six hours, only to sell it off or forget about in an accumulating pile of unmemorable movie tie-in games. Children will most likely enjoy the game immensely, though it’s always difficult to tell why: take a kid’s favourite character and combine it with some passably produced graphics and an easy-breezy platform, and --presto--you might just have a hit. What makes Ratatouille’s infantilism so frustrating, though, is Heavy Iron’s willingness to shirk a Pixar tenet: produced for children, enjoyed by adults. The vast majority of Pixar’s films have balanced these two worlds impeccably, coupling the slapstick humour and redundant one-liners children gravitate towards, with the veiled bawdiness and tongue-in-cheek references that only adults will really pick up on. As a result, Ratatouille is a good game that in no way lives up to its film father. Sure, most gamers will enjoy what is a decently put together dish, but will soon realize that this goulash and dumplings, while delicious and filling, can only be so satisfying for so long.