DreamWorks Shrek the Third

The interesting wrinkle in Activision's third Shrek tie-in is that it never asks you to be Shrek for long. Levels are built around a small travelling party, and you rotate through them with a button press: the ogre for heavy swings and crates that nobody else can move, Donkey for kicks, Puss in Boots for speed and reach, plus members of Fiona's makeshift princess brigade once the story reaches them. Each one gets a single ability, and each one is the answer to a particular obstacle. Once you have identified who solves what, the puzzles stop being puzzles.

That structure is the most honest thing about it. 7 Studios built a linear action-platformer sized for the school holidays, running roughly the length of a rainy weekend, with combat that resolves into two attack buttons and a special meter. Enemies are guards and witches who telegraph everything. Health is generous. Falling into a pit costs you a few seconds. The game is not trying to test anyone, and it does not pretend otherwise, which puts it a rung above the tie-ins that layered fake difficulty over the same amount of content.

Where it earns a bit of goodwill is co-op. A second player can join at any point and take one of the other party members, and because the character-swapping design already assumes two sets of abilities are working in tandem, the multiplayer does not feel bolted on. A parent playing Donkey while a child bulldozes ahead as Shrek is close to the ideal use of the thing.

The presentation shows the compromise you would expect from a PS2 release in 2007, when the same game had to ship on newer hardware as well. Character models are recognisable rather than expressive, the environments are boxy and dim in places, and the cutscenes lean on stills and clipped dialogue rather than the film's voice cast in full. It looks like what it is: the lowest-common-denominator build, done competently.

A decade and a half on, the film it was selling has faded further than the game has, mostly because the game never had much to lose. What survives is a tidy, unambitious co-op romp with a genuinely decent central idea buried in it, the kind of licensed product that keeps its promises precisely because it made small ones.