Wallace & Gromit in Project Zoo

Gromit is the one you control, which is the only sensible choice anyone could have made. Wallace stays mostly in the background, tinkering, handing over the porridge gun and the turnip launcher and generally being the reason things have gone wrong in the first place. A penguin has bought the local zoo and is trafficking the animals; the dog has to sort it out. Anyone who has watched the shorts knows that division of labour by heart, and Frontier Developments clearly did too.

What the studio got right first is the look. This is one of the better licensed likenesses on the PS2 — not a cartoon approximation but a genuine attempt at plasticine, with thumbprint texture on the surfaces, slightly wobbly animation and the boxy, hand-built geometry of an Aardman set. Cages, crates and pipework fill the zoo levels in a way that feels modelled rather than rendered. The voice work and the score do their part as well, and the whole thing carries the tone without resorting to cutscene mimicry of the films.

The game underneath is a conventional third-person platformer of its moment, closer to Rayman than to Mario 64. Gromit digs, hangs from bars, swings on poles, throws boxes onto pressure plates and shoots things with vegetables. Combat is simple and repetitive, and the camera has the era's usual habit of pinning itself against a wall when you most need to see a ledge. Collectibles are everywhere, mostly cogs and bones, and the pacing is built around finding enough of them to open the next door.

Where it holds up is in the small ideas. Levels that require you to bury and re-emerge somewhere useful, mine-cart segments, a boss encounter or two that asks you to read a pattern rather than mash. Where it falls down is difficulty: some late platforming is genuinely fiddly for a game pitched at younger players, and the checkpointing is not generous enough to soften it.

It was reviewed decently and quietly forgotten, which is roughly the fate of most competent tie-ins from 2003. But competence is not nothing. This is a licence handled by people who watched the source material carefully, and the result is a platformer that looks like a Wednesday evening on BBC Two and plays like a slightly stiff but honest afternoon. Gromit never says a word in it, and he never needs to.