Madagascar Escape 2 Africa
Ages: Everyone

It starts out with King Julian giving orders on how to fix the plane so that our four Madagascar buddies can leave the island. There are interesting cut scenes and actual voices, but soon it degenerates into a platformer with bash, find and double jumps. It’s a cop out to depend upon double jumps for game play. You play mostly Alex the Lion and Marty the Zebra, who has a most unwieldy back kick. Clever "assist" landings allow you to have one of the other minor character not active at the time, like Melman the giraffe or Gloria the hippo to help. Battling enemies with the Y and X buttons get you coins and eliminates barriers.

The characters all have special moves which are assigned to them as they enter a scene. Movement is with the D-pad. The game ignores the touch screen, except for a mango for throwing and as an ad for the movie. There are various venues - I presume they mirror the movie: the African Savanna, a volcano and water play in rivers and a dam.

The Madagascar crew looks good and the environments are colorful and somewhat above average, and as I said, there is the voice acting. With all this good stuff - they should go back and make a better game.

Fun Factor: Pretty standard
Female Factor: Gloria the hippo
Player Friendly: The manual gives little about playing the game just lists the menu selections and suggest for more information visiting the web site.

Reviewed by: Editor - 11/08