DreamWorks & Aardman Flushed Away

The clay-look surfaces are the first thing you notice. Aardman's film was CG doing an impression of stop-motion, and the PS2 conversion inherits that job at a much lower budget, chasing thumbprint texture and bulging plasticine eyes with a fraction of the polygons. It mostly works from a distance. Get close to Roddy's face during a cutscene and the illusion thins out, which is a fair summary of the whole package.

Most of the running time is straightforward third-person platforming through Ratropolis and the pipes beneath it, with Roddy climbing, shoving crates and dodging the odd slug. The levels are short and generously checkpointed, which is the correct call for the audience, and the camera behaves itself more often than mid-2000s licensed platformers usually managed. Combat is barely there. What passes for challenge comes from the timed downhill stretches, where you steer along rushing water and gutter runs and the game briefly finds a rhythm the walking sections never do.

The other half is minigames, and they are where the disc earns its keep on a couch. Two players, quick rounds, party-style scoring, built around set pieces from the film rather than generic filler. None of them is deep enough to hold an evening on its own, but rotating through a handful with a younger player is the use case the developers clearly had in mind, and it holds together better than the single-player campaign does.

What dates it is the pacing. Cutscenes are lifted or paraphrased from the movie and drop in constantly, so progress arrives in small spoonfuls between clips, and anyone who has not seen the film will find the plot arrives as a series of loosely connected jokes. Voice work is competent without the original cast doing much heavy lifting. The soundtrack recycles a handful of themes until you notice.

Judged as a 2006 movie tie-in it is well above the floor: it runs cleanly, it is not cruel, and it does not pad itself out to twelve hours to justify a full price. Judged as a platformer, it is a pleasant weekend that never asks anything of you. Aardman's design language survives the trip to the PS2 more intact than most licences ever managed, and that visual charm is the reason to go back rather than anything you actually do with the controller.