DreamWorks Over the Hedge

The suburbs in this one are a maze of hedges, garden fences and porch lights, and the game's best idea is that you rarely cross them alone. A second player can pick up a controller at any point and take over one of the other animals, which was not standard practice for licensed platformers in 2006. Most of them shipped as solo affairs with a co-op mode bolted on, if at all. Here it is the default assumption, and it changes how the levels read.

Edge of Reality built the thing around four playable characters with clearly separated jobs. RJ the raccoon is the agile one, Verne the turtle can retract into his shell and roll, Hammy moves in sugar-fuelled bursts, and Stella the skunk clears rooms with a smell attack that doubles as crowd control. Levels rotate through them rather than letting you pick freely, so the design leans on each animal's one trick in turn. It is a tidy structure. It is also a limiting one, because once you have seen what each character does in their first stage you have seen most of what the game intends to do with them.

Combat is light beat 'em up work against exterminators, dogs and gadgets, punctuated by collecting food to fill a quota. The platforming is forgiving, which is correct for the audience, and the camera is the usual sixth-generation compromise: mostly fine, occasionally snapping to an angle that makes a jump harder than it should be. Activision's tie-in pipeline of the era produced a lot of worse than this, and a few better.

What holds up is the tone. The animation carries some of the film's timing, the character banter is short enough not to grate, and the suburban art direction gives every stage a legible shape rather than the muddy brown corridors that plagued so many quick licensed builds. The DreamWorks cast is not reproduced in full, but the voice work does its job without sounding phoned in.

As an adult game it is thin, over in a handful of hours and generous to a fault with checkpoints. As something to hand a younger player alongside a parent who can jump in halfway through a level and out again without a menu, it still works exactly as intended, which is more than most films-turned-games can claim two decades on.