Nickelodeon Tak and the Guardians of Gross

By 2008 the juju had thinned out. The Tak series had started strong enough on PS2 in 2003, a competent third-person platformer with a likeable shaman kid and a sense of humour that didn't talk down to anyone, and it was still going five years later as a tie-in to the animated show it had spawned. Guardians of Gross is that last gasp, and it arrives on hardware that was by then being kept alive mostly by budget-conscious families.

The hook is transformation. Tak spends less time relying on his staff and more time shifting into beast forms, each with a movement or combat trick that unlocks the next stretch of level, and the design leans hard on swapping between them to clear obstacles. It is a sound structure for a kids' platformer, since it keeps a short attention span busy without demanding much precision, but it also flattens the challenge. You rarely fail. You mostly work out which animal the room wants and apply it.

What carries the game is presentation. The cartoon's voice cast and art direction come across intact, the humour stays in the register of playground gross-out rather than anything winking at parents, and the levels are colourful in a way the PS2 could still manage without strain. The camera is the usual sixth-generation problem child, snagging on geometry in the tighter combat arenas, and the fighting itself is thin once you've seen every beast's handful of moves.

There's a practical honesty to it. This is a licensed platformer made to a deadline for an audience that wanted more of a show they liked, and it does that job without embarrassing itself. Set it beside the first Power of Juju and you can see what got lost along the way: the earlier game had puzzle-platforming with some bite to it, while this one is built to keep moving.

For a modern player, the interest is mostly archaeological. It's a snapshot of how Nickelodeon properties were being converted into PS2 discs at the tail end of the console's life, competent and forgettable in roughly equal measure, and a reminder that a series can outlive the ideas that made it worth playing.