14 DAY TRIAL // 
I really enjoyed Tim Burton's "Charlie and the Chocolate Factory" film, made after Roald Dahl's charming children's book with the same name from 1964, with Johnny Depp playing the eccentric yet endearing chocolatier Willy Wonka. It did not take long before a cluster of visionary minds joined together in the effort of chopping it down to its bare "essentials" and making it fit into a sublime arcade experience befitting their own microscopic standards.
Story The Charlie and the Chocolate Factory game offers none of the delights that made the film appealing and, unless you've seen the film, it isn't going to make a great deal of sense either. Charlie Bucket is a kind, caring poor boy whose greatest love in life is chocolate, and who, by a near miracle, manages to find one of the five golden tickets which admits him into the chocolate factory of the reclusive Willy Wonka, for a guided tour by the chocolate maker himself. During the tour, the other four golden-ticket-holding comrades, a fat boy called Augustus Gloop, a spoiled brat called Veruca Salt, a compulsive gum chewer named Violet Beauregarde and a television-obsessed little boy called Mike Teavee - each an allegorical representation of the vices found within the personalities of children - cause a number of problems which they are eventually punished for. Playing the game as Charlie however, you are forced to complete all sorts of repetitive menial tasks with the goal of putting right all the things going wrong in the factory. Yes, it really is as mind numbingly boring as it sounds.
Gameplay The gameplay in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory is unbearably repetitive and revolves around finding the diminutive Oompa-Loompas scattered around the fairly small unexciting levels in which you find yourself, and "puzzle" solving, with a bit of platform jumping and item collecting thrown into the mix. The primary purpose of the Oompa-Loompas is to fix and operate the strange machines that make up the heart of the factory, and you can tell them to follow you around, as there are a number of tasks that require you to make use of their skills.
The lack of variety becomes apparent very early into the game, almost all of the small linear levels being repeats of the previous ones. Once you've learnt about each of the different worker types, the same Oompa-Loompa-based simple unimaginative tasks are repeated again and again, as are the tedious candy bar collecting, blocking pipes or shoving crates, these made all the more rubbish by the fact that the control of Charlie, the collision detection and camera control are all woefully executed.
Puzzles vary greatly in difficulty, some of them being impossibly hard, and not owing to their actually requiring you to use your brain like the one where you have to toss a big ball at a pipe in order to block it. It's tricky business to pick the bloody thing up as it rolls away whenever you get remotely near, let alone hit the spot with no way of aiming it whatsoever. You just have to position Charlie in what seems it might be the right position and press the button. Not to mention there are a dozen pipes to block and the physics are downright atrocious. And when you think someone actually imagined this would be entertaining?
On the other hand, the AI of the Oompa-Loompas is terrible. There are times when they don't listen to your commands, sometimes running in circles in one spot, or simply get stuck behind objects in the environment. The camera seems to only have eyes for the candies, making the platforming sequences such as the one in which you have to bounce from platform to platform on a blueberry version of Violet Beauregarde even more frustrating.
As if that wasn't enough, certain levels are quite vague in their objectives, leaving you to wonder what other yawn inducing task you're supposed to do next. Here, the game does have a sort of built-in help system, with Grandpa Joe lending a hand whenever you get stuck, but he dispenses the same hint over and over again, one per stage, and even that isn't much help as it provides little guidance.
As you advance through the factory, you learn seven powers revolving around the use of some of Willy Wonka's special candies. You get the Everlasting Gobstopper, which acts as a projectile weapon of sorts, the Candy Balloon on top of which Charlie can bounce around and reach high areas, The Rock-Candy that forms a solid spherical candy shell around Charlie which he can use either offensively, for ramming hostile Wonkabots, or push objects around, the Fizzy Lifting Drinking that enables Charlie to float in the air, concepts which must have looked good on paper, but have been appallingly realized thanks to the sluggish controls and inebriated camera.
Video The graphics are simply hideous. Everything is drowned in color and gaudy, as if the one who gave the game its looks was either color blind or has extremely dubious tastes, and the environments are so barren of detail that the factory looks more like a real industrial complex than the wonderful fantastic spectacle we've come to expect from the film. The game does have some excellent stylish storybook-style cut-scenes, but that's pretty much everything it has to offer in the visual department.
Audio The game's audio is its only saving grace. Except for Johnny Depp, voiced by a great imitator named James Taylor who reprised his role admirably, each member of the film's cast has brought their voices into the game and have done an excellent job in the process. The narration is also excellent and fits the story perfectly, and I absolutely loved Winifred Phillips' whimsical musical score, the same man who composed the music in God of War, even if it rarely deviated from repeating the same few loops over and over again, ad infinitum.
Multiplayer It doesn't have mutiplater.
Conclusion This is one of the worst games I've ever had the displeasure of playing, comparable to having a mouthful of rancid chocolate and nothing to drink afterwards. Avoid like plague.
