The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe Preview

Another new movie and another game based on a movie.  But this time the movie is based upon a classic series of books.  At E3 2005 Buena Vista Games was showing off an early version of the game.  In case you’re wondering what book the game is based upon it’s The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe.

The surprising part that too many gamers at E3 didn't know about Narnia was the game is an action game with heavy emphasis on combat.  The demo I played allowed you to control all of the children from the movie.  Each character had their own attacks which helps in keeping the action somewhat varied.  But the combat was really a hack 'n slash game where you had an almost endless amount of creatures attacking and you just kept hitting them. 

A nice feature of the game was the ability to have the children team up for specific moves.  There was a section in the demo I played where there was a tree down blocking a path to the next part of the stage.  None of our attacks would damage the tree but by teaming up the two girls I was able to use their combined attacks to break the tree.  This helps in creating a large amount of different moves to use during combat since you can team up the characters with each other. 

Since there are three characters, you can switch out between the characters at anytime with the press of a button.  Quick and easy to perform, this helps in determining which character you will need to use for a particular spot in the game.  Unfortunately the demo didn’t expand on the feature too much since it was just non-stop action.  Using the boy was the best bet since he was the strongest character.

The graphics in the game looked good but nothing that will wow anyone.  Out of the different versions on display I thought the PS2 version looked better than the Xbox or GC versions.  There were some nice graphic effects that did bring out a little bit of a WOW factor.  The level at E3 had you walking around on a frozen lake pond while some large birds were dropping rocks on you.  The rocks would break through the ice which looked good along with some nice reflection of the characters on the ice. 

BVG stated the game was really in alpha stage so there is still a bunch of work to be done.  The movie doesn’t come out until late this year so hopefully there should be plenty of time to get the game in shape.  Fans of the book will probably be surprised at the amount of action but that shouldn’t keep them from giving the game a try.  The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe was a classic book so maybe, just maybe, the game could become a classic as well.

For All E3 2005 Previews