Walt Disney Presents The Santa Clause 3: The Escape Clause
Score: 55% ESRB: Everyone Publisher: Buena Vista Developer: 1st Playable Productions Media: Cartridge/1 Players: 1 Genre: Platformer
Graphics & Sound: The Santa Clause 3: The Escape Clause provides typical 2D platformer graphics. There’s various things for you to jump over, jump on, pits to fall into, ice to slide on, etc. There are places where it’s difficult to figure out if you can jump on something or not, but it’s never hard to test. In between the four areas, you also get to see still graphics from the movie. It would have been nice to have the voices with it. Instead, they just scroll the text across the images. Actually, it would have been nice to have voices of any kind in the game. The only sounds you get in The Santa Clause 3 is generic background music. There’s no real noticeable change between levels.
Gameplay: Gameplay in The Santa Clause 3: The Escape Clause is just plain boring. I’m not sure if they were trying not to give the movie away or if they just thought that people wouldn’t want to know what was going on, but I still have no clue what the point of the game was. The Santa Clause 3 has four levels, each level has four areas under it, with a bonus elf puzzle and a bonus toy delivery at the end of the level. In the first two levels, you’re playing as Santa Claus. Your only “weapon” is a jack-in-the-box that magically melts all your enemies. Along the way, you can also pick up bags of toys that you can throw at ice walls to break them. In the third and fourth levels, you play as Scott Calvin (the man who is Santa Clause). You throw snowballs as your weapon. It would have been really nice for them to explain why you were now the man and not Santa Claus. Through each level, Jack Frost is your enemy. After you beat the final level, it just ends, there’s no finale or anything. After you beat each area, you can go back and replay those at any time to try and collect more of the milk and cookies.
Difficulty: To be honest with you, I beat The Santa Clause 3: The Escape Clause in under two hours. When I got to the end, I was honestly expecting more levels to appear. The platformer levels are extremely easy. You might have to replay them a few times because you fell off of the ice, but since it only takes a few minutes to complete each section, it doesn’t take you any time at all to get through. The elf puzzles are only slightly more complicated. They do require a very slight bit of work to make it in under the time limit, but there’s only four of them, so it’s not like they’re enough to keep you busy.
Game Mechanics: The controls are really easy to use in The Santa Clause 3: The Escape Clause. Right on the D-pad moves you forward, left moves you back. The A button causes the character to jump, pressing A twice will let you double jump. The B button activates your “weapon”. Right shoulder button throws the toy sack. There is no save option, the game just autosaves after each area. There is a sleep option however, which will allow you to essentially hibernate the Gameboy and save wherever you are in the middle of a level. Overall, the little bit of The Santa Clause 3 that does exist is OK to play. But considering that unless your grandmother lives next door, you’ll beat this game before you even get to her house, so it’s not one that’s going to keep you entertained for any length of time at all.
-Cyn, GameVortex Communications AKA Sara Earl
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