Over the Hedge review (GameCube)

These sorts of challenges might sound kind of rad on paper, but the mostly one-button combat and the high-volume/low-variety ratio of enemies pretty much puts the kibosh on much of the game's fun. There are a few mildly inspired moments in Over the Hedge where it veers away from mindless beat-'em-up action, such as an early sequence where you run through the titular hedge while avoiding cattle prods and bear claws, or a later sequence where you have to run down a suburban street while dodging traffic like some kind of version of Frogger, rotated 90 degrees. These moments are few, though, and never present a real challenge.

One of the few unique things about Over the Hedge is the fact that, even when you're playing by yourself, there's always an artificial intelligence-controlled companion animal to back you up, and you can switch between the two of them on the fly. It ends up being kind of a so-what feature, since there's little appreciable performance difference between any of the characters, and you rarely even find obstacles that require cooperation to overcome. We ended up playing as Verne the turtle most of the time, just because we liked his double-jump animation better. The game encourages you to revisit levels that you've already completed by including several secondary objectives that can eventually earn you access to a series of minigames, which maintain the game's precedent of being easy and predictable with such activities as wrecking up golf carts, racing RC cars, and swinging at golf balls to break stuff.

We can't speak on the quality of the film Over the Hedge, since it's not in theaters yet, but the game Over the Hedge doesn't really inspire much interest in the property. The PlayStation 2, Xbox, GameCube, and PC versions of Over the Hedge are mostly identical and are saddled with the usual quirks of their respective platforms--expect more jaggies on the PS2, awkward controls on the PC, and so on--though no one version is so different that we can really recommend it. This isn't an aggressively bad game, it's mostly just boring.