It's somewhat ironic that the target audience of Disney's Meet the Robinsons have probably never heard of Lost in Space, not even the heinous film with That Guy From Friends. It's also somewhat disheartening for those of us who do remember it, given that the celluloid travesty is almost ten years old, and that the original TV series aired over three decades ago. Why is this relevant? Well, it isn't really, except that a good many people who hear about a family of Robinsons will immediately think of the space-faring family from Lost in Space. Yet aside from sharing a Will Robinson and having a sci-fi bent, the two have nothing to do with one another.

Sure, there's the whole sci-fi angle of future tech and robots and such, but this Robinson family is most definitely not stranded anywhere like the Swiss Family Robinson that the Lost in Space family was based on. In fact, Robinson Industries is a thriving business that provides a great many of the gadgets and gizmos of the future: try to imagine if the offspring of Steve Jobs and Bill Gates got hitched and created a monopoly on anything useful.

It is at around this juncture that the film and game part ways, as both tell a different story and focus on different characters. The game focuses on young Wilbur Robinson, whose supporting role in the movie has been upgraded to central focus for the game. Like most teens in these sorts of movies, Wilbur is brash and energetic and always seems to end up in trouble, which is the set up for the game. After taking the old man's time-machine for a joy ride through ancient Egypt, Wilbur manages to get home in time to take out the trash, only to forget to lock the garage door. This allows the film's main villain, the Bowler Hat Guy, to sneak in and pinch the cool chrono-shifting contraption for his own nefarious ends. So now it's up to you to pull Wilbur out of the fire before daddy dearest gets home and notices his pride and joy is missing.

Meet the Robinsons plays a lot like you'd expect from the standard movie tie-in videogame experience: it's a third-person action adventure title that is inoffensive without innovating, designed to be a pick-up-and-play for the average punter. In this regard, it checks all the right boxes and does an admirable job, yet at the same time, it hints at the potential to be so much more than average. Meet The Robinsons is a 3D platformer at heart, but it embraces a sense of adventure that makes it more like Sphynx or Kameo or dare we say it, Zelda.

It does this by making use of fairly sizeable environments that allow you to explore, as well as back track when you've acquired new gizmos that in turn lets Wilbur access previously unreachable areas. There's plenty of collectibles to be found, including concept art, action figures and VR discs that unlock new characters for the Chargeball mini-game. But more importantly, many objects can be deconstructed and broken down into their base components, which Wilbur can then use in the Transmogrifier to create all sorts of useful things. Acquiring the many blueprints in the game is yet another challenge, and these provide the template for transmogrification, allowing the construction of cheats and enhancing Wilbur's health, energy, gadget strength or carrying capacity. It's very RPG-lite, but it keeps you actively engaged with the environments as you make your way through the game's forty-odd missions.

Despite all this, Meet the Robinsons is a simple game out of necessity, so it can appeal to both younger gamers or people who pick it up based solely on the movie license. Controlling Wilbur is pretty straightforward, combat is basic for the most part, and while the lock-on targeting can be troublesome, for the most part it ensures that the battles go your way. This isn't to say it's insultingly simple or anything, in fact, most enemies will require you to utilise a combination of gadgets to bring them down, so it isn't just point-and-shoot by any means.

Wilbur has a few key gizmos: the disassembler is used to acquire components for blueprints and also un-make enemies, the chargeball glove allows you to fire balls of electrical goodness to fry bad-guys and activate switches, the havoc glove lets you burrow underground to avoid obstacles and blast enemies with a sonic boom, and the lev-gun lets you lift heavy objects among other things. Three tools can be assigned to the face buttons with ease, allowing you to utilise your preferred gizmos quickly, while leaving the A button free to interact with the environment. Each gadget has abilities that make it useful outside of combat, and the majority of the game's puzzles require judicious use of all of the gizmos. In fact there's a whole slew of havoc glove puzzles for you to find and beat, and they play like the digging mini-game in the fabulous Okami on Playstation 2, which is to say, they're fun and quite challenging!

It's just as well there is a nice range of exploration options and mini-games to play too, because Meet the Robinsons isn't the longest game around. In fact despite the various travails back and forth through time, you can probably clock the game in under 10 hours. Achievements are a reasonable spread of story-based and puzzle/mini-game and collection-based goals, and as such there shouldn't be any need to replay the game for the savvy Score-whore. Perhaps the trickiest thing is remembering to use the scanner tool to analyse items in the environment – it handles much like Metroid Prime did on Gamecube, except pushing the corresponding scanner button without locking on sends out a scan pulse that instantly identifies objects of interest in the area. You need to scan 130 objects to get an Achievement, and given that there's less than 150 scannable items in the game, you can't afford to miss too many.

Luckily the environments are quite engaging, so scanning isn't as much of a chore as you'd expect. Meet the Robinsons is an incredibly faithful interpretation of the film, and with the 360's added graphical prowess and horsepower, it actually looks surprisingly good for a cross-platform port of a movie tie-in. Disney have created a very Jetsons-esque look for the film, and the game brings this to life in often hilarious detail. Meet the Robinsons also has some terrific boss-battles, making use of epic set-pieces and gigantic opponents to get your juices flowing. These look great as well, and while they boil down to simple pattern recognition for the most part, they're great fun. The frame-rate is rock solid too, and overall it's a very professional job...is it worse that this is surprising, or that so many movie tie-ins aren't that we've all grown cynical?

The game also boasts some genuinely funny dialogue and cutscenes, and the voice talent do a great job bringing the various zany Robinson family members to life. The musical score is a tad on the repetitive side, but it isn't something that is likely to annoy anyone. It's also worth mentioning that the Xbox 360 version has an exclusive mini-game called the Security System, where you have to defend the Robinson mansion from the dastardly Bowler Hat Guy's attacks by shooting in a first-person perspective to preserve the integrity of the various rooms. Each of the four rooms requires a different strategy: keeping food on the table in the dining room or stopping the flowers from dying in the garden, for example. It's fairly mindless spray'n'pray action really, but it's fun nevertheless.

Parental Perspective:

Meet the Robinsons is a great way for your kids to continue enjoying the latest Disney cinema extravaganza: it looks great, it plays well, and it isn't too difficult. Some of the boss battles and later levels can be tricky, but the forgiving checkpoint system mitigates some of the potential frustration here. There's plenty of cheats to unlock too, which should assist in getting past any of the trickier sections.

The separate story means that seeing the movie isn't a necessity either, which means there's also enough new material here to keep the youngsters interested. All in all, you could do a lot worse when looking for a suitable game for the kids on the Xbox 360.