Ratatouille: Food Frenzy
Score: 60% ESRB: Everyone Publisher: THQ Developer: Helixe Media: Cartridge/1 Players: 1 Genre: Family/ Themed/ Action
Graphics & Sound: Ratatouille: Food Frenzy is to the original Ratatouille as kart-racing is to regular racing. The graphics go to the opposite side of realism and portray the characters in almost a cut-paper, graphic style. Everything here is blocky, colorful and super kid-friendly. Remy looks adorable and all the characters have a similar appeal. This doesn't mean that the interest level for older kids is diminished because there's plenty of challenging play. The clean graphics are probably a better bet for DS anyway since they make fine use of this platform's limited ability to display fine detail. Action happens on both screens, although the action you control is really only on the bottom screen. Sometimes you'll see things on the top screen and have to react by tapping, blowing, or pressing a button. The smallest objects start to look a bit obscure, but there's never any confusion as to what you should be doing on-screen because the gameplay is basically a series of mini-games. The sound of cooking is mixed in nicely with some music that sounds inspired by if not lifted from the movie. Since all the mini-games revolve around chopping, stirring, sizzling, flipping, and other tricks of the chef's trade, it is nice to hear each technique reflected by realistic sound effects. The presentation of Food Frenzy is fine as long as you don't come expecting a retread of the first game.
Gameplay: The graphics are scaled back and simplified so it stands to reason that gameplay will follow. There isn't much to do in Ratatouille: Food Frenzy, but some of the mini-games are pretty involved. The disappointment is that you'll see all that Food Frenzy has to offer in the first hour. Everything after that is just a variation on a theme. Some mini-games are very much what you'd expect from the cooking theme, such as cutting up food. The touch-screen is nice for this, although the sensitivity and level of difficulty is not well calibrated. The other standard, safe game involves dropping ingredients in a pot or on a fire to cook them up as part of a final dish. This game does some neat things like measure heat and force you to balance how you stir and add ingredients. If the dish overheats, you blow into the DS microphone to cool things down. Less standard games include one called "Flip the Fish" that has you grab fresh fish, cook them to perfection, and bounce them up onto serving plates. The fresh fish are on the hoof, courtesy of Linguini, and the platters are also moving past via restaurant servers. Two games involve sorting and dividing food on the fly. In one, you watch vegetables rolling down a chute into a pot. Stirring the pot clumps vegetables together - if enough get together, you can stab them with a fork to take them out. This plays like a reverse version of Bubble-Bobble. The final unique games include an action-packed attempt to clean the kitchen of snails by flinging sponge pieces at them. This doesn't involve much strategy and is the easiest of all the mini-games. The other game is neat because it uses motions on the touch-screen to decorate a plate as the plate is headed into the dining room. Colette takes care of the ingredients; you just have to tell her where to put them. There is good intention behind this selection of mini-games and the replay value is good because you would like to do better in each segment and improve your restaurant's reputation more quickly. The problem is that most of these games suffer from very imprecise controls and a frustrating level of difficulty for most younger kids. Ironic that the game one would judge on the surface as perfect for the littlest Ratatouille fans is actually more difficult than the game striving to be more of the realistic, "you saw the movie now play the game" game. With practice and some adult help to parse the instructions, Ratatouille: Food Frenzy is accessible, but it just shouldn't have to be this hard.
Difficulty: The mini-game is, to me, best when fun, frantic, and short. A collection of mini-games that don't require much strategy or complex controls would be a great fit for a fun, faux cooking-sim. Ratatouille: Food Frenzy is most definitely not fun or short in most cases because the level of frustration quickly rises. Gestures must be perfect and in-the-line to register successfully in games like "Slice & Dice." Just making the motions in the right region won't do it, you have to absolutely nail the lines drawn for you to follow. It would be fine except that the timer is ticking and it is totally unforgiving. If there were the option to adjust difficulty , which there isn't, the default timer should be the Expert Chef level or something close. I'm pretty darn coordinated from years of twitchy shooters and platforming titles and I ate the dust again and again and again. The games that have much more sedate mechanics, like the "Cooking with Remy" segments, only require that you add ingredients and stir without burning the stew. The early levels are at a moderate level of difficulty, meaning you really have to work to burn anything. The next iteration instantly doubles the equation, which will totally befuddle kids as they try to master moving back and forth, adding ingredients, stirring, and blowing into the microphone to avoid burns. The "Flip the Fish" segment requires coordination on par with Halo's Legendary mode (okay, not quite that bad... but close!) and I don't think I ever quite nailed it with any consistency. The developers - as if in deference to the kids with tears streaming down their cheeks and the parents hunting for the receipt in their wallet (finding out only now that opened software return policies aren't generally that liberal) - allow you to skip a level after you've failed it a few times. How often do you see this in a game? Not much. It's like they just knew that if they didn't include the "okay, you lost three times, but you can go on anyway" feature, nobody would see much of their game. Why not just dial down the difficulty a bit or improve the way the game handles?
Game Mechanics: Cooking with touch controls should be an ideal scenario. The mechanics of stirring, slicing, pushing, sorting, scraping, etc. all translate nicely to moving around the stylus on the touch-screen. Ratatouille: Food Frenzy just doesn't feel very tight in how it responds to touch. The issues have already been mentioned so instead, why not focus on the positive? The layout of the screen and how you have to combine the D-pad with the stylus is well thought out. At no point will you find your hand cramping up because you're trying to play Twister with your fingers on the DS. Almost all the action happens on the touch-screen anyway, so he with the quickest and steadies stylus wins the day. Using the microphone to blow hot food was a nice touch, although not terribly original. It would have been great to see other creative uses for the touch-screen or the standard controls during mini-games. The instructions for playing only flash on screen if prompted, like knowing how to play is some kind of hint? The manual isn't a lot of help but at least it outlines the various games you'll play. Saving is automatic, like so many other games these days. Ratatouille: Food Frenzy isn't the worst game I've ever played, but it just falls so far short of where the movie left viewers in terms of being such a high-quality production. The lack of any multiplayer is a complete mystery and the simplified graphics are unfortunately wedded to simplified gameplay. The level of difficulty is really over the top and unacceptable for a game that is being marketed to a younger audience. More variety and a wider array of short, accessible mini-game action might have made this a worthy follow-up to the original game and a righteous way to carry the license. Frankly, I'd rather play a Ratatouille kart-racing title than this Cooking Mama wanna-be...
-Fridtjof, GameVortex Communications AKA Matt Paddock
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