For those that aren’t in the know Phineas and Ferb is a Disney Channel cartoon about two stepbrothers who get on grand adventures during their summer vacation and making extravagant inventions from regular household items ala MacGyver. It’s become so popular on the Disney Channel that it’s worthy of its original TV movie and a spinoff video game to go right along with it. Now is it worth playing a game if you’re a fan of the franchise or if you’re not, I’ll let you know.

The game at first looks a lot like a Ratchet and Clank game, this shouldn’t come as too much of a surprise since High Impact Games developed the excellent Ratchet and Clank: Size Matters on the PSP. The only thing is it’s a stepped down Ratchet and Clank with fewer weapons, lack of camera control since it’s a Wii game without a second analog stick and you can’t lock onto enemies which makes it pretty hard to pick a specific enemy at a time to take out. The game doesn’t have the polish or the humor of a Ratchet and Clank game and you feel as if you’re playing a sloppier version of it.

As well as your normal platforming you have interludes of shoot’em up style flying segments where you have your normal gun: the baseball cannon, along with the ability to use special missiles (fireworks) and team attacks. You can do team attacks because you have two characters on the screen at all times where in single player you can switch between the two and have one always controlled by a CPU or you can have to people in the same room playing at once. The two-player mode is pretty fun and gives you a reason to pop out the game in when you have some friends over, especially since the normal AI is pretty dumb.

The game is built for kids so for any adult playing it will find the game way too easy without much challenge to speak of. You’ll be able to breeze through the game within a few short hours. The only thing that gives it any replay is you need to unlock characters and items using the game’s built in store. You collect coins in levels that in turn lets you play arcade style games to collect tickets that can be exchanged for stuff in the store. If you’re a completionist you’ll find a few more hours this way but there really isn’t much to do.

The game controls use the Wii’s Remote and Nunchuk but it doesn’t really take advantage of motion controls. Besides the menu controls it just simply uses the analog stick and buttons to control almost everything. The only time the motion sentivity came into play was simply to use it as another button and during a single minigame. So if you’re trying to find a good 3rd party motion game this isn’t it where it’d be better served with a normal controller but it works just fine here.

The game uses a pretty nice cell-shaded graphics engine and I can’t really complain about the graphics as far we’re talking about a Wii game. As far as 480p goes everything looked pretty sharp and if I took off my glasses I would have thought it’d be something I’d be playing on my Xbox 360. The game is bright and colorful and each world has enough character to make them look unique. The game has a catchy title screen though the actual game music is pretty generic. As I’m writing the review a few hours after last playing I can’t say I really remember much about the music and it’s pretty forgettable besides the title screen music.

Phineas and Ferb Across The Second Dimension is clearly a game aimed at their target market, kids who watch the cartoon. In that case I’d say it mostly succeed, as they will appreciate the game’s low difficulty and tie in with the series and it’s really not that bad of a tie-in game. That said I’d probably wouldn’t pick it up if you aren’t already a Phineas and Ferb fan or have kids who are.

Gameplay

Graphics

Sound

Overall

[Show as slideshow]