Disney-Pixar The Incredibles - Rise of the Underminer

The film ends with a drill bursting through the pavement and a masked rodent declaring war on the surface world, and then the credits roll. That gag is the entire premise of this 2005 tie-in: someone at THQ looked at the joke and decided it was a plot. Heavy Iron Studios, already the studio behind the first Incredibles game, took the Underminer seriously enough to build a whole subterranean campaign around him.

What separates it from the movie adaptation is the pairing. Mr. Incredible and Frozone work the levels together, and the second controller can join at any point, which is more generous than most licensed games of the period managed. Bob does the heavy lifting — grabbing, throwing, punching through walls that only he can break. Frozone handles range and traversal, freezing enemies solid and skating along ice paths. When you play alone the AI takes the other slot, and it is competent rather than clever, which means the co-op design shows its seams whenever a puzzle wants two sets of hands.

Combat is straightforward crowd control against waves of mechanical diggers and mutant vermin, with collectibles feeding an upgrade system that buys stronger attacks and longer power meters. The loop is short and legible, and it was clearly built for players who were nine years old in 2005. Nothing here asks much of you. The camera fights you in tight corridors, the underground environments blur into one long brown tunnel, and by the third stage you have seen most of what the enemy roster is going to do.

What holds up is the character work. The voices are close enough to the film cast, the animation carries the squash-and-stretch personality Pixar built into these bodies, and Frozone in particular feels good to control because his movement is genuinely different rather than a reskin. That is more care than the licensed-game economy usually paid for.

It runs about four hours and never pretends otherwise. Judged against the sixth generation's ambitious brawlers it is thin, but judged against the shelf of movie cash-ins it sat beside, it is one of the few that understood a two-player couch game was the right shape for a superhero family story. The Underminer never appeared again in the films. This is the only place he got his due.