As with The Golden Compass, Sega’s pathetic offering from last Christmas, The Spiderwick Chronicles features the kind of kids you just want to dropkick through a windshield. As such, that’s an immediate obstacle for us enjoying a movie tie-in – with every kid’s film, there’s seemingly a well-groomed child around every corner, waiting to ruin everything. Spiderwick Chronicles suffers from the same sickness, but the ineptness of its design isn’t as angering as we expected it to be.

Fear not, however, as this induces a much more depressing emotion: boredom. The Spiderwick Chronicles thrives on pressuring the player into menial, questionable tasks that practically have no worth at all. The game is peppered with rubbish QTE sequences as well, so there’s certainly a lot of dysfunction within the game’s structure. This probably has something to do with the story’s premise, which isn’t exactly a thrilling one– three kids in a big house stroll into some stupid realm, find out there’s a war– so it’s hard, like many film-to-videogame transitions, to see why it would work as a videogame.

Still, we have a lot of hatred reserved for this type of Narnia-groping idea. It feels like it was written by authors with names like Bollard McCliché, or Silverton Dunceworth, so it’s hard not to feel sorry for the developers. It’s their fault, though, that they decided to include puzzles about a child’s cat, or making a bridge out of a log. While never broken, The Spiderwick Chronicles comes very close to being a cancerous lech of a title, threatening to sit on your dashboard and suck away all of your credibility.

It also looks like an Xbox game, which adds further offense. Somehow, though, the developers have a knack for being consistently mundane, no matter what you’re doing– therefore, it’s easy to hate the game, but hard to despise it. As an adventure title for small idiots, it’s almost acceptable, but only the true cretin can really sit through it. Simply put, if Spiderwick Chronicles is your idea of fun, then you’d probably laugh at the sight of Mick Hucknell impaled on a loose elephant tusk. Come to think of it, that’s much better than this.

Samuel Roberts