DreamWorks Monsters vs. Aliens

Switching protagonists is usually a tie-in's way of padding a short campaign, but here it genuinely changes how the ground works underfoot. Ginormica is fifty feet tall, so her stages treat buildings as furniture and crowds as obstacles to step over. B.O.B. is a gelatinous blob with no bones, which means he squeezes, sticks and absorbs rather than jumps cleanly. Dr. Cockroach climbs walls and ceilings. The Missing Link punches things. Four characters, four sets of physics, and the level design mostly respects that instead of flattening everyone into the same platformer verb list.

What Activision's 2009 release does with that idea is modest. Levels are corridors with light combat, a handful of switches and collectibles, and the occasional set piece where scale is the joke — a giant woman wading through a freeway, a blob oozing into a vent. Enemies are alien drones that die in two or three hits and exist mainly to interrupt the walking. Nothing here asks for timing you don't already have, and the checkpointing is generous enough that failure is a brief inconvenience rather than a setback.

The PS2 version is the one built to a lower spec from the start, and it shows mostly in the environments: flat textures, short draw distances, crowds reduced to a few repeated figures. The character models hold up better than the cities they walk through. Animation is the strongest art asset in the package, particularly B.O.B., who wobbles and reforms with more personality than the writing gives him.

It arrived in a crowded year of movie games and did what the format demanded. Follow the plot beats, give the kids in the audience a controller, finish in a weekend. The licensing economy of the late sixth generation ran on exactly this arrangement, and most of those games were worse than this one because they picked a single hero and a single verb.

There is a better version of the concept buried in here, one where the four bodies have to solve problems together rather than taking turns. What's actually on the disc is a friendly, short, undemanding action platformer that respects a young player's patience. Its best moments are the ones where you stop fighting and simply notice how differently each monster occupies the world.