Who didn't like Shrek? With little to no hype the first movie took everyone by surprise with its smart humour and send up of Disney and Fairy tales. Featuring excellent voice work by Mike Myers and Eddie Murphy and littered with great movie references only the most jaded film critic seemed to find flaws in it. The guys at Pixar might have been disappointed, but probably only because they didn't create it!

Unfortunately the first game wasn't as well received. The graphics were great and it also featured some excellent renditions of the movies locations but the gameplay, sadly, went down as well as a big green Shrek fart in an elevator. Although the Shrek 2 movie hasn't been released yet, the second game seems to follow the general plot of the movie (from what I can gather from the trailer and overseas reviews) fairly closely but instead of a bog standard movie tie-in we get a pretty decent adventure game filled with loads of detail, colourful graphics, 4 player co-operative play and even 2 new locations not featured in the film!

If you've seen the trailer you pretty much know what the general gist of the story is. Shrek and Fiona have married and have been invited by her parents back to their castle in ‘Far Far away'. They obviously want to meet the ‘handsome prince' that rescued her from the dragons' tower in the first film. In the game you are faced with the to-be-expected puzzles and adventuring all viewed from a third person perspective. Along the way you also get a number of other characters join your 4 person party such as Gingerbread Man, Little Red Riding Hood, Big Bad Wolf, Puss in Boots and a little fairy. Each character has their own distinct animations and attacks and one of the great features that lifts Shrek 2 above the ordinary is that you will face puzzles that require the abilities of one or more of your party to solve.

The developers, Luxoflux (who previously brought us True Crime : Streets of L.A) must be commended here as while a few of the puzzles and mini games do feel similar the different characters bring loads of variety to the game. They each have different attacks, for example, Donkey has his ‘Burro Blast' that he can use to break certain objects or knock down baddies, Ginger Bread Man has his candy cane that he can throw like a boomerang as well as his (sadly named) ‘Cookie Toss'. Princess Fiona has a few karate moves and can also slow down time. Big Bad Wolf can use his ‘Huff ‘n Puff' move to blast objects and this is very handy as you can even aim it and blow baddies off ledges. There's more moves and as mentioned, from time to time specific puzzles require the use of a characters special move to solve. Puss in Boots can tightrope walk which is used to gain access to areas in the levels that the others can't get to and Shrek is the only character strong enough to lift and throw objects.

The levels are bright, colourful, surprisingly well detailed and feature loads of destructible bits. In the ‘far far away' level street lamps don't simply break with one big Shrek punch, but they bend and show damage until they finally do break. I was honestly surprised at just how much detail has gone into the games graphics and environments. Sometimes you run into characters that will give you a task to perform, other times you are free to simply roam around and pick from a number of tasks that you aren't even obligated to complete. You can finish the game without having completed every task in the game and you aren't punished for skipping any, the game actually gives you the option of progressing to the next level once you've completed a certain amount of tasks. This means you can fly through to the end, or take your time and complete the whole game and then come back if you want to finish more tasks, which you can do at any time. Sure, the levels contain the age-old action of beating numerous scores of baddies, picking up power ups, coins and puzzle solving, but it's all done in such a way that while somewhat repetitive, is rarely boring and great fun.

Some of the missions involve ‘Hero Time'. You only get control of one character during these ‘mini-games' and involve flying the Dragon to rescue Fiona's carriage, a singing competition where the goal is to make Fiona pop a tree full of blackbirds and amongst others, a face off with Puss in Boots. They get more challenging as the game progresses and may even get a bit too tricky for many kids to complete as they even had me a bit frustrated at times. But the majority of the game would be pretty standard fare for younger gamers, and dead simple for older ones, just be prepared to give them a hand in a few spots. In one 2 hour sitting I completed 35% of the game and all up it can be completed in about under 10 hours but that wasn't with every task finished.

The sound in Shrek 2 is pretty well done. The voices aren't supplied by Mike Myers, Cameron Diaz or Eddie Murphy but 95% of the time they sound pretty accurate and there's a number of throw away lines that you will hear repeated numerous times. The 4 player co-op is a great addition and gamers can jump in at any time by hitting the ‘start' button on any controller. There is no Xbox Live support but aside from co-op I couldn't really imagine any Shrek multiplayer modes that would have any sort of long term appeal online anyway so it isn't really missed.

If there's a few small complaints to level at Shrek 2 it's that the humour is kind of flat and doesn't feature the witty satire, or any of the more mature in-jokes that the movie had. Your team mates A.I doesn't appear to be super advanced either and they do tend to get in your way and ignore coins and other pickups even if they are standing right next to them. Lastly, at times the camera is a complete nightmare, as is normal for the majority of third person games, but while you can normally move it around, zoom in and out, at times it's totally fixed in place and this causes a few moments of frustration here and there.