Unfortunately, nobody cares about your children in the same way that you do. It makes sense in principal, sure, but it also means that a great many people hate your children. They don’t mean it, luckily, but videogames like The Golden Compass seem to imply that publishers, at the very least, are harbouring a subconscious resentment towards the little people. On paper, The Golden Compass does everything to prepare a child for an adult’s life: it encourages menial tasks, constant failure and enforces the malicious vehemence of authority. In reality, however, The Golden Compass is a game that’ll cause more tantrums than a paraplegic lemur at Marwell Zoo. It’s an acutely stupid game that rarely comes close to being genuinely entertaining, and even by the standards of other licensed games, it falls very short.

This wouldn’t be the case if The Golden Compass lavished the His Dark Materials saga with anything resembling sense, but Shiny has opted for an obscure foray into animal duels, retarded investigations and clumsy platforming. Not one of the game’s facets is explored deeply enough to categorise The Golden Compass into one genre, but the diversity of the gameplay has just given Shiny more chances to fail. Alas, it takes every opportunity to squander any potential that the variation could’ve had, and the fruits of its rare moments of creativity are entirely accidental.

With six completely different formats to create ports for, the Xbox 360 version of The Golden Compass suffers from an obvious degree of visual decay. It’s basically an Xbox game in HD, and that never cuts it on the 360. Character models look lifeless and boring, while the environments are insultingly mundane to anyone with the most basic eyesight capabilities.

The gameplay is happy to play its part in The Golden Compass’s downfall, too. While starting out as Iorek, a polar bear with some rather daft-looking armour, you find that the game basically consists of only pressing a single button at any one time. The story is nastily integrated via the usual insertion of movie scenes, which portray the film as a botched fantasy vehicle of sub-Waterworld proportions. Shiny has made no genuine effort to link sections together with useful narrative, so when you go from riding a polar bear through the ice, back to Jordan College in Oxford, it makes about as much sense as seeing Alan Yentob in a sandwich parlour.

Initially, these rapid-fire polar bear sections are perfectly acceptable; it’s amusing enough to ride through the snow, even if it’s too simple to enjoy for any longer than four-and-a-half minutes. When you’re forced to engage wolves in combat, though, the game laughably dies on its arse. There’s no reason for any human being to push the same button, again and again, as the wolves are brutally slaughtered by a needlessly angry polar bear. The collision detection issues and anti-user responsiveness of the controls are part of a whole wave of familiar problems, and the fun veneer of The Golden Compass begins to dissolve after just a short time of play.

Suddenly, The Golden Compass has you embroiled in the sordid tales of a very stupid world. The hair falls off of your head as you try to determine why you have to ‘win’ a conversation with some spice cake, or why a fat lady opens a window for five seconds, talks loudly to herself, and then shuts it again. Our favourite moment of obscurity is an out-and-out war between Pantalaimon, your Kameostyle daemon companion, and an orange chimp. In front of a fireplace. On an airship. While you throw things at the chimp! What in the hell is going on? It’s like a Rudyard Kipling novel, only written by Stanley Kubrick!

After that uncouth moment of raw brilliance, everything recesses into the usual chamber pot of licensed misguidance. Deciphering ‘symbols’ on the alethiometer is as challenging as a Sesame Street word game, while the pitiful ‘Gyptians’ are poorly constructed stereotypes of unintelligent gypsies. We could go on, but it feels as if everything we ever knew has been turned upside down by angry polar bears.

The Golden Compass is like stepping into another world; albeit, one that is 50 times worse than our own dying planet, but a fascinatingly broken one, nonetheless. The story of Lyra is ignorable to the point of apathy, and the surrounding gameplay only furthers the embarrassment with each headache-inducing new aspect. The controls are constantly dodgy, and the recurring ‘deception’ mini-games just slam the brakes on the pace of this appalling experience. Still, we’d almost like a sequel, even if it’s only to see a rematch between the talking cat and the aggressive monkey. Strange stuff.

Samuel Roberts