XBW goes hands on at Ubisoft Sydney..

Over the last decade, CGI animation films have experienced a steady growth, often becoming top-grossing films at the box office. Drop a name like Shrek, Finding Nemo or Madagascar and people will instantly know what you’re talking about…the reason being they not only saw the film and bought the merchandise; they probably played some form of videogame as well. The latest animated flick to boldly go where almost every other has gone before it is Open Season.

Open Season tells the story of a domesticated grizzly-bear named Boog, whose days usually involve being hand-fed by the ranger and occasionally participating in the town’s nature show for kids. His world is turned upside down when he finds himself stranded in the woods, and he’s forced to rely on a deer with one antler named Elliot to get him back to the warm embrace of civilisation. The catch? Hunting Season is about to start, and we all know how much Americans love their ridiculously overpowered semi/fully-automatic rifles when small furry creatures (or each other, really) are involved.

Naturally the wildlife is petrified, and it’s every critter-for-themselves. Except Boog knows the humans, he’s lived around them for years, and aside from the right-to-bear-arms-with-an-under-barrel grenade launcher, and a president who makes Genghis Khan look like Ghandi, they aren’t that scary. So Boog and Elliot team up to form an animal alliance to take the fight back to mankind, and the results aren’t too bad at all.

We sat down with the Xbox 360 version of Open Season at Ubisoft HQ, and played a near-final build of the game, which looked great. Although obviously a cross-platform title, the visuals had clearly been upgraded to make better use of the 360’s muscle in that department, and as expect the game runs in high-definition with a rock-solid framerate. The characters and locations look like an almost perfect copy of what we’ve seen of the film too, which is great for authenticity, although apparently the actors from the movie don’t lend their voices to the videogame. The reasoning being that most younger kids wouldn’t even notice, and that the visuals are close enough to the big screen that most adults won’t either. Whoever fills in for Martin Lawrence and Ashton Kutcher does a bang up job anyway, and anything that deprives Lawrence of money is alright in our book.

Game-wise, Open Season is definitely playing to the younger part of its audience; while the film has plenty of grown-up jokes, the gameplay is pretty non-violent and easy enough for any kids to pick up and play. Despite what you may have seen in trailers, tiny woodland creatures with chainsaws and various sharp implements are NOT how Open Season plays out on consoles. Rather, it’s a healthy blend of sneak’n’scare…sort of like Sam Fisher, but with a “Boo!” instead of a bang.

Boog the bear can scare the hell out of hunters with his fearsome roar once he gets close enough to a lone gunman, but the real fun starts when he is up against an entire raiding party. Still considered an outsider tainted with the stink of the big city (either that or he needs a bath), Boog must rely on Elliot to grease, er, hooves/paws with the rest of the great outdoors to enlist their help. By gently hurling Elliot at a woodland creature, you can recruit it to your cause, and every critter has a different skill. For example, guide a squirrel to a tree and the little bugger will throw acorns at a hunter and keep him dazed, allowing you to pick him or his friends off at your leisure. We get the feeling that the latter levels will involve a degree of puzzle-solving to work out which critters to use in which location and on which hunter to survive without ending up on a mantelpiece.

Of course there’s more to the action that just terrorising hunters; Boog will have lots of goodies to collect throughout the course of the game, and there’s a variety of other types of levels to engage with. Our favourite involved guiding Boog and Elliot down a raging rapid on the roof of an outhouse dunny, avoiding rocks and other hazards while simultaneously jumping for collectible goodies.

Open Season is looking like a great action-adventure for kids of all ages, and like most of these types of movie tie-ins, there should be plenty of fun for adults too. No official word on a release date for this one yet, but we’d bet our hunting licence that it should be in our sights before the movie is released in November.

Article by Dominic Rozenberg