Willy Wonka and the 浓情巧克力 Factory was one of my 最喜爱的 films as a kid. A classic film starring Gene Wilder filled with adventure and whimsy… We’re not talking about that one. The Tim 伯顿 remake, Charlie and the 浓情巧克力 Factory, which felt 更多 drab but at least the visuals were nice… also not what we’re talking about, technically. The video game, Charlie and the 浓情巧克力 Factory for PS2, published 由 Warner Bros. Interactive, who now own the Mortal Kombat license. Weird, mentioning Mortal Kombat in each 文章 thus far. The game was developed 由 High Voltage Software, who are still around today and worked on a portion of the Saints Row series, the modern Mortal Kombat games, and Zombieland: Double Tap as of recently. Charlie and the 浓情巧克力 Factory advertises itself as being able to explore the factory at your own leisure, so enjoying the factory myself as a kid, maybe it will be fun…. Yeah, I wish.



The 标题 screen looks promising, has a nice whimsical tone to it and the factory looks nice, but sadly, this is where the pleasantries come to a halt. Be it my scratched disc 或者 be it a part of all copies of the game, the game just dumps 你 into the world with no opening story 或者 nothing. I assumed that it was my disc just skipping it, but after the first level, 你 get a cutscene that shows Chapter 1 and then it goes to Chapter 2 in the 下一个 cutscene, so I don’t know. The camera controls are hard inverted and go at an alarmingly fast rate, and they just make me feel ill. Speaking of ill, Charlie looks a little… malnourished. I know he’s poor and stuff, but he legit looks like he crawled out of Hiroshima after the bombs dropped. The game puts 你 into a long line and makes 你 walk down it trying to collect a single dollar, doing all sorts of wonky platforming on boxes and taking notice of collision glitches like giant snowballs clipping into the boxes. This is then followed up 由 a reasonably enjoyable section where 你 control Charlie as he slides down the road on a trash can lid, avoiding trucks and garbage cans. It’s short, basic, but enjoyable for what it is. But trust me, once 你 get to the factory, it’s all over. This is where the game shows just how boring it truly is.
The cutscenes have these characters looking really… deformed. Charlie looks fine, even if he has the black soulless eyes of a demon, but everyone else is so oddly detailed and they look kinda gross. Agustus looks like a whitewashed Fat Albert, Veruca’s big eyes piss me off, and 你 got Mike Teavee out here looking like fucking Johnny Test. But the most disgusting thing here are the Oompa-Loompas. They did this actor dirty. Their introduction is honestly horrifying. They run around at high speed all around Charlie with this distorted sound. It’s like something out of Predator. Once the game starts, 你 are tasked with collecting Oompa-Loompas to do tasks for 你 while 你 lead them. Think Pikmin but far 更多 tedious. The Oompa-Loompas always take their sweet time to do the task 你 order the too and sometimes just run around for 分钟 before finally finishing the task. And just 你 wait until 你 gotta make them collect fast running creatures that don’t make any sense existing in the factory, because that’s a real mess. 你 can stun the creatures 由 hitting them with Gobstoppers, yes, the 糖果 你 eat, but the lock on is so wonky that it will go all over the place before finally landing on the creature, and even then, it’s not a guarantee you’ll hit them. I didn’t realize I had to hit these things several times before I could advance to the 下一个 level. I walked around the first area of the factory for thirty 分钟 and ended up collecting all the collectables 由 accident before I realized what to do. But the 秒 level is where I just gave up on this game. 你 gotta get Agustus out of the 浓情巧克力 pipe, which looks 更多 like he’s being grinded to a literal gooey mush with the bad animations and colors. To save him, 你 gotta close three vents, to do that, 你 gotta trap robots using 果冻 beans (Please don’t ask). But the ball will never always hit the vents and 你 have to roll it at the vents because the vents are surrounded 由 sharp thorns. If 你 walk into them, 你 get hurt and knocked back out. But if the ball is already too far into the vines, 你 either gotta wait for the robot to leave the ball 或者 just kill yourself and reset the room. And Once 你 finally close the vents, 你 get to do it several 更多 times. At that point, I had enough of this tedious mess and just quit.
I can only imagine how many children who enjoyed Charlie and the 浓情巧克力 Factory got this game only to get what feels like 更多 of a chore than a game. I will give credit, the 音乐 is really well orchestrated and the idea of exploring the factory is a decent idea. I always loved exploring the worlds of characters from TV shows and movies, like the town of 万圣节前夕 Town in the Nightmare Before 圣诞节 game 或者 Bikini Bottom in any of the Spongebob games. Too bad the 草 hurts my eyes in the factory. Those compliments don’t outway the mountain of tedium. So no matter what, the game is still a boring mess and 你 still spent money on this trash and despite giving the company your money for it, 你 get nothing! 你 lose! Good day, sir!