Disney's Tarzan - Untamed

Somebody at Ubi Soft looked at the Tarzan license and saw a snowboarding game. That is the honest read on this one: the jungle here is treated less as a place to explore than as a course to be run, with mudslides standing in for halfpipes, sheets of bark for boards, and vines for grind rails. The European release was called Tarzan Freeride, which is a far more accurate description of what the game actually does.

It splits its time between two kinds of level. The straightforward ones are third-person platforming — climbing, swinging, thumping hyenas and baboons with a fist or a thrown fruit, collecting the usual scattered pickups. The others are downhill runs where you steer Tarzan through a chute of mud and water at speed, dodging rocks and jumping gaps, closer in spirit to a licensed racer than to a jungle adventure. Jane turns up as a playable character in her own stretches, and there is a rhino-riding section that behaves roughly like a battering ram with a steering wheel.

The problem is that neither half is tuned tightly enough to carry the other. Tarzan controls loosely for a game that asks him to make precise jumps, and the camera has a habit of settling exactly where you do not want it, particularly during the vertical climbing sections. The high-speed runs fare a bit better because momentum papers over imprecision, but they are short and repeat their obstacles quickly. This was an early PS2 release built for players who had just seen the film and the television series, and the difficulty and length are pitched accordingly.

What holds up is the look, at least in stretches. The jungle has real depth to it, layered greens and shafts of light, and the sliding levels move fast enough to sell the sense of a canopy blurring past. The animation on Tarzan's knuckle-walk and vine work is the one place where the film's physicality survives the translation.

It is a curiosity now rather than a lost gem — evidence of a moment when every licensed platformer was quietly borrowing from Tony Hawk, and when a Disney ape man could be handed a board without anyone at the publisher blinking.