Planet 51, both the CGI animated move and the game-tie in by Spanish developer Pyro Studios, ultimately suffer the same strange fate. The sheer amount of financial investment and technical ability in order to make high-quality CGI is mind blowing. The cost an estimated 60 million dollars to make, with Illium Studios using over 200 Hewlett Packard workstations chugging 50,000Gb of raw data through 1500 dedicated render cores. The creative staff represent more hours of training and education than a squadron of ninja, have the patience of Buddhist monks, and a stronger obsessive-compulsive work ethic than an autistic ant colony. Yet despite all this incredible technology and talent they made a boring movie, and so it is that despite clear technical competence and no shortage or investment, Planet 51: The Game is about the most tedious title to grace your console with this holiday season.

There is a moment of what can only be described as existential dread when you find out the title in your hand is a vehicle based movie-tie-in: without a shadow of a doubt the absolute worst, most poorly made, actively contemptible area of game imaginable. It therefore cased moments of actual elation when in the first moment of play the game turned out to look pretty, handle acceptably in terms of frame-rates and draw distance, and seemed to capture the 1950s Americana visual tone of the movie. The game loosely follows the plot of the film, if every plot development and scene in the original involved doing something with a vehicle. The original Driver series that started on the PS1 was a subtle pastiche of the Getaway movie, where somehow every problem from a ticking bomb to dietary potassium deficiency could be solved by driving really fast between Arbitrary Point A and Arbitrary Point B. Planet 51 tries to shoe-horn the existing movie plot into the same format, which is at best painfully forced and at worst utterly surreal. The driving is not always racing, and the difficulty level is orientated at the youngergamer throughout, often with the challenge being simply to drive at your own pace from one point on the sizable world map to the other. This is achieved via one of a number of hovering vehicles, loosely styled after 50s classics which can be summonsed from frequent roadside stations or simply by car-jacking the passing civilians.

I say car-jacking, but given this is a minor-friendly game, the reality is in fact a whole lot more polite. In fact if you put in front of a Republican Committee on Public Decency and let them censor everything they thought a danger to our moral fabric, Planet 51 is pretty much exactly what you'd be left with. Approaching a vehicle and pressing the button and your character will givea cheery wave, and the prior driver will scoot over and insist you give driving a try. Cannon recklessly down the sidewalks and the worst that will happen is that there will be some comedy bird-tweeting and stars around heads in a Looney Tunes fashion, maybe an occasional white picket fence knocked over. The closest the game comes to is the ability to give other racers a bit of a love-tap toslow them down, a sanitised destruction derby mini-game, and the occasional need to chase down and bump a thief or villain off the road. Not one sign of a green, alien space hooker as yet but Ill keep looking.

So Planet 51 is the product of all this technical ability and investment, following an established and very popular game genre, using character models and environments that have already had millions of dollars lavished upon them. However, its almost as if the folks responsible at Pyro Studios had never played a game, or could not quite grasp the key concept of the product they were meant to be making. The otherwise well-designed characters wave their arms and move their faces utterly at odds with whatever is meant to be occurring or being said. This has the effect of most of the time of just looking cheap, but occasionally makes everyone seem dangerously psychotic. The world map whilst impressively large is often lifeless and contains mile after mile of identical polished Middle Americasuburbia. Some of the A-to-B missions can see you driving through a whole lot this landscape, populated entirely by aliens with fixed grins and unmoving faces, waving their arms around randomly, through a never-ending hellish repetition of the frozen American dream. For the love of god dont play this under the effect of any sort of recreational chemical or youll end up on the roof recreating scenesfrom Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas.

The entire game is undercut by a fundamental lack of understanding of what it is human beings gain pleasure from. By repeating the same mini-game up to ten times you unlock new vehicles that you can cruise around in, but the improvement in handling or performance is usually imperceptible, if not completely nonexistent. Within the Bicycle class of vehicles the difference between the 'Style Bike', 'Thief's Bike' and 'Delivery Bike' is purely the basic colour, nothing else. Quite why this would enthuse us to play the exact same repetitive paperboy mini-game is anyone's guess. The AI is generally dumber than a sack of hammers, but is guilty of that most shriek-inducing sin that console owners will be familiar with from way back in the days of Kart and Street Fighter: the computer cheats. Should some accident befall you, the AI can open up vast leads on the player, but it's not afavour you can repay. No matter how fast you race, or how much traffic you nudge your opponent into, you cannot lose him. Smack them into incoming traffic and burn the entirety of your turbo, and the AI will simply bob along behind you like he's attached by an invisible bungee. The penalties to them for hitting other traffic or obstacles is miniscule - a design disparity that makes the whole mechanic ofbeing able to sideswipe your opponent useless. Should the player by a series of fortuitous happenstances manage to over-stretch that invisible bungee, they are in danger of the computer simply teleporting the opponent in front of them. What seems to be at last a comfortable lead opening up results in a Wacky Races style-double take as you catch a glimpse of the opponent rounding the corner in front ofyou. This is such a terrible, frustratingly artificial way of attempting to make the races more interesting that what should have been a uninspired but charming enough little racer is actually made worse by the inexplicable cutting of programming corners.

All of the vehicular based tasks, from lawn-mowing to paper delivery to point-to-point races are all uninspired, and come in ten levels to complete to unlock various goodies. The first couple of times you partake, they are far from terrible and there's a tangible sense of being in this strange little alien Americana as depicted in the movie. If due to some horrible brain disease you love the film, it would likely be exciting to get to wander around in that world. However, each of the tasks turn out to be just an exact repetition of the time before, with simply fractionally less time, or one additional obstacle. After realising how unappealing the rewards are for this slavish repetition, not even the most dedicated collect-em-all Pokemon alumni will want to go back for more.

Planet 51 has been put together with a significant amount of money, market savvy, technical ability and all those other things that really just do not matter when making an interesting and entertaining computer game. The title completely lacks innovation, engagement, or for want of a more empirical term, soul. It does not even have the accolade of being actively bad, it is instead just utterly mediocre. Ironically, Planet 51: The Game feels exactly like it has been made by technologically advanced aliens with no understanding of what you humans call 'fun'.

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By Duncan Lawson