All the fun underneath Paris!

Author's Rating:

Pros: Fun minigames.Cool extra features. OK sounds and graphics.

Cons: Might be to simple for the adult crowd. not surprisingly easy.

The Bottom Line: 
Might make a good gift, and maybe a break for you who's been playing gut-wrenching Resident Evil for too long. : )

Author's Review
The Story
Another movie to video games adaptation, it's really no surprise the story takes up loosely the plot and the story of the movie.
So that means you're not getting anything new from the cut scenes. It just looks like the worse-rendering version of the movie.
In the movie, Remy came from the countryside and was forced to move because his insatiable curiosity towards the world of gastronomy and culinary. Well, actually, he caused himself and his whole colony to be flushed down all the way to the sewers of Paris. In the game, this is exactly the case too. You get to steer Remy's way to the sewer, on top of Gusteau's (Remy's role-model chef) recipe book. So there's a very frisky beginning of the game. Ok, there's actually this tutorial-ish level. But i guess that doesn't count. Up until you get Remy on a bottom of the sewer, he'd be separated from his colony and family. This is the time when you met Gusteau, a ghostly fragment of Remy's imagination who founded the 5 star restaurant he happens to live under. Gusteau than will guide you to all the objectives of the game. As he is on the path to rebuild the restaurant back to its glory days. He'll also guide you to the wonderful world of Gusteau's kitchen. On his quest, Remy will get some bit of help from Linguinni, mainly when preparing food. Ok, what else..mm...
I'm afraid that's just about it story-wise.
So basically there are several 'worlds' that you can explore from the sewer which acted as some kind of hob that interconnects remy's worlds . From the parisian market, the restaurant's kitchen itself, the city streets, etc. But for me there isn't so many of them. All the while you're going to be collecting gusteau's point that are scattered all around.
Most of the objectives are around stealing food from the human through long and complicated route. You jump and swing around various boxes, platforms, tightropes, ledges, and other pieces of the environment to get to areas that has specific items, bring them back to other characters, or use them on other specific objects to unlock the next objective.

Minigames
The minigames are pretty cool to look forward to. Although most of them is about collecting 100 gusteau stars at one go. There's a cheese-themed one, a fruit-themed, meat, desserts, just to mention some. It's fun looking at first, jumping from one eclair to another, but after several so much similar scenarios, it just gets tedious.
And there's the one when you get to cook through the hands of Linguini. A quite amusing and simpler version of Cooking Mama. Minus the Japanese-style frills and hoorays.


Controls
It's pretty clear this game is designed to be kid friendly. There aren't much of button combinations. It's mainly jumping with the A button or moving the camera around with the C button, or trying to keep steady while rope-crawling with the Z button, If you somehow forgot these fool-proof controls, you'd be reminded by the on screen hints. In the minigames though, there are some other better uses to the Wii-mote. Especially while cooking with Linguini.

Extras
So what to do with all those collected points? well, for a start you could 'buy' stuff from here. From pictures (which i still haven't figured out the use of), minigames, to the movie's 'behind the scenes'.


Overall, i think this game is a great fun for your nephews. But for the rest of you that's been around at least since Play Station 1, you might yawn a bit on your way to rebuild the Gusteau empire.