Zathura: A Space Adventure (video game)

Zathura: A Space Adventure (video game)
An awful game to an underrated movie.
Protagonist(s): Walter Budwing Danny Budwing Genre(s): Action Adventure Platformer Puzzler (sometimes) Platform(s): PlayStation 2 Xbox Release Date: NA: November 3rd, 2005 EU: January 27, 2006 AU: 2006 (PS2) Developer(s): High Voltage Software Publisher(s): 2K Games Country: United States

Zathura: A Space Adventure, or simply known as Zathura is a 2005 action-adventure game based on the movie of the same name, which, in turn, is an adaptation of the 2002 children's book by Chris Van Allsburg. It was developed by American studio High Voltage Software and published by 2K for PlayStation 2 and Xbox.

Why It's an Awful Adventure

1. Starting off, the entire game looks and feels pretty blurry, bland, and uncreative when it comes to all of the environments and characters.
2. The entire story is too generic and uninspiring, especially for a game set in space.
3. The framerates sometimes drop and slow down very unnecessarily.
4. The camera angles are pretty badly angled during certain sections of the game. It could make it hard to see where you're going.
5. This game has lots of glitches across many parts of the game where you can glitch your character past certain walls and fall out of the level to your death.
6. Walter and Danny are rather annoying protagonists and sometimes don't shut up. Some of their dialogue is both of them arguing and yelling at each other non-stop as things go wrong around more than half of the time.
7. The entire game is extremely repetitive and boring, due to the few gimmicks in the game just repeating themselves so often. It doesn't help that all of the 5 locations in the game are incredibly lengthy, further sucking out most of the fun altogether. It is even more repetitive than Sonic Boom: Rise of Lyric.
8. The enemies take far too many hits in order to be taken out, no matter what weapon the player is using. In fact, the game doesn't even let you choose your own specific weapon, instead you're stuck with your current weapon and it can only be changed by collecting a different type of weapon.
9. The astronaut is a rather generic character when compared to the movie. In the movie, he was an older version of Walter, but in this game, he's just an additional character for the sake of it.
10. Poor grasp of the source material. For example, Lisa (Walter and Danny's teenage sister) played by Kristen Stewart never appears in the game.
11. The boss fights are all very similar to each other, and there are only 4 of them in the entire game. None of them even have their own health bar, so its hard to tell how much health they have remaining.
12. All of the characters are way too similar to each other, and they all function about the same, therefore making it almost feel like you only play as one character, despite it obviously not being the case.
13. The level where you play as the Robot on a space rock is completely pointless and void-like. You can just run away from all of the Zorgon ships if you don't want to deal with any of them.
14. Sometimes, the loading screens can take a rather long time. They could last almost as long as Sonic '06's loading screens. This can be justified due to how long this game's levels usually are.
15. The 'Z' collectibles barely unlock anything. It takes 50 of them to even get an unlock and they don't even tell you what is unlocked after collecting enough of them. They apparently unlock certain scenes from both the Zathura and Jumanji movies, which don't help at all since people can just buy or rent these movies.
16. Some parts of the story aren't exactly explained well. A few examples include:
    • How come anytime either or both Walter and Danny are captured by the robots or aliens, they don't immediately get killed by them afterwards?
    • How did the Robot survive all the Zorgon ships shooting at it after the void-like rock level?
    • How did the Zorgons get to the house and steal all of the 'junk' and the board game?
      • These can be possible plot holes.
17. The game can be needlessly hard due to all of the traps (especially in the last few levels). There are also so many enemies that can shoot at the player at the same time in many different parts of the game.
18. Also, the game is way too long overall, ranging at about 4 hours of gameplay to finish the whole game.
19. 2-player mode is completely useless in this game, yet it exists anyways.

Redeeming Qualities

1. Some parts of this game are actually faithful to the movie and the original book and the idea of different planets and locations add a little bit of variety to this game.
2. The voice acting from all the characters is actually pretty decent and realistic.
3. Thankfully, the game doesn't have a life counter. This is very merciful since if you didn't have unlimited lives, it would've made the game even harder.

Reception

The game was received unfavorably by critics, with the PlayStation 2 version received a Metacritic score of 43 and 48 for the Xbox version, it scored a 3.4 out of 10 on IGN, GameSpot gave the PlayStation 2 and Xbox versions 5.6 and 5.7 out of 10 respectively, and TeamXbox scored a 6.7 out of 10.

Trivia

• Lisa (played by Kristen Stewart), from the movie, doesn't appear in this game for an unknown reason.
• Walter and Danny always wear their backpacks for the whole game's duration.
• The game was released on November 3, 2005, eight days before the release of the film.

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