Ahhh, I like getting awful licensed games for cheap. I love Philip Pullman’s books but haven’t seen the movie adaptation on which this game is based. Still, that won’t stop me! Basically this is a cheap, clumsy licensed game from a software house that specialises in cheap licensed games.
Clumsy is the word that kept returning to me while playing. The platforming, the stealth, the combat, the alethiometer minigame; none of it is particularly accomplished, or fun. There’s also technical problems: slowdown is frequent, especially when your viewpoint is split between two characters.
To elaborate, the game is a sidescroller where you play as Lyra, a young girl with a special destiny. She’s a bit frail but can grab ledges and pull levers and stuff; her gameplay is supplemented by puzzles or combat involving her dæmon Pan. Pan can switch between different animal forms; you can unlock extra forms as collectibles, which I think are mostly aesthetic but I only ever found two. In his forms, Pan can fly, dig, fight, etc. You also meet the bear Iorek eventually, and his sections are mostly just lazily beating up waves of bad guys. There is some strategy in combat; soldiers are sometimes accompanied by their dæmons and targeting one will bring them both down.
You can have two of the characters active at a time, and it’s a nice idea to switch between them based on their skills. But key word: clumsy. It’s often a requirement to run up to the second character and give them a “follow” command, lest ye backtrack repeatedly. Controls are unintuitive. The gameplay possibilities are interesting but not executed super well.
There’s also levels that take the form of dialogue trees. Sometimes this will include interludes of using the alethiometer to divine the truth or find the right response. It’s a good way of including this key plot component into the gameplay and involving the player in the story. It’s too bad that the game either forces backtracking and scouring levels to find collectibles which tell you the meaning of symbols and how to draw them in the touch screen minigame thing, or else looking up the solutions online (which is what I did).
On the one hand, I like encouraging a player to get invested and search out these things in the corners of the game. But on the other, I wasn’t having much fun playing it so I just wanted to get to the end. And that’s the Golden Compass DS. It does an OK job portraying the world and characters in game form, but it’s not a good game. Sorry.
