The story of The Incredibles begins when super heroes or ‘Supers' offered their vigilante services for the greater good, upholding truth, justice and capturing the bad guys. Unfortunately for the Supers, the ungrateful public did not appreciate the level of destruction that accompanied their heroic actions and various lawsuits ensued. Ultimately the Supers retired from crime fighting and returned to normal everyday lives.

Unfortunately for the public, Super Villains are back and the heroes of old are forced out of retirement to combat this new menace. Luckily for us, and bad news for the bad guys, Mr Incredible and Elastigirl hit things off and now there's a whole spandex outfitted super family ready to save the day.

Having played and reviewed a number of Xbox games aimed at children lately I've noticed the differences between the good and the bad ones. Kids games need to look cool and need to be long enough to so they don't get finished in a weekend. They shouldn't be repetitive in order to avoid boredom and most importantly they need to be easy enough for kids to play without getting terminally stuck and asking mum and dad to constantly help out.

Most kids' games accomplish the first two but in my opinion the second two seem to be the hardest to achieve and The Incredibles is no exception to this rule. A number of rudimentary design flaws have resulted in an unnecessarily difficult (at times) and repetitive game that ultimately doesn't contain anything that we haven't seen before.

Countless times whilst playing The Incredibles, I said to myself things along the lines of ‘How many times do I have to do this?' or ‘If only the checkpoints were closer together.' or ‘Where the hell am I supposed to go now?' and finally ‘Arrrrgh! [Expletive] [Expletive] [Expletive]' That should give you a pretty good idea of what a few hours with The Incredibles is like. Clunky controls, platforms that are just a little too far apart, endless ‘find controls to open door/disable laser beam' style puzzles and having to repeat already repetitive stages are just some of the things that really start to annoy you sooner rather than later.

For example, there are numerous stages that require you to disable impenetrable laser beams. I understand that touching these beams too many times will eventually kill my character but why can enemy goons simply walk through them unscathed? When playing as Elastigirl, you will have to swing from specific objects. In order to do this the game needs to automatically target these objects and this process doesn't always work well which results in an untimely death or two.

In platform heavy stages, the platforms seem to be only just close enough together so that you have to wait until the last possible moment before jumping or to release your swing in order to make it across safely. Finally some of the boss battles are relatively easy (for a patient gamer), but the multiple battles with the giant spherical four-armed killer robot are sure to drive you insane.

Disappointing gameplay aside, The Incredibles does look the business. The graphics are fantastic and levels are separated by DVD quality footage from the film. The game uses the graphical capabilities of the Xbox to great effect producing a visual splendour of colour and excitement. Of the original films voice cast only the easily recognisable Samuel L. Jackson has been used to provide the voice for his in-game character. The original cast is of course used in the video grabs from the film but the amount of voice work required by the very reasonable sound-alikes is limited.

The scenes from the movie look amazing but don't really help progress the story that much. They do however add a level of authenticity to the game and is representative to the level of support provided by Pixar Studios during development. The game follows the same story as the movie and fleshes out areas only touched on in the film and for this reason I would suggest seeing the film before playing the game for the best overall experience.

During the game you will be able to play as four different characters, each with their own abilities that lend themselves to very different styles of gameplay. The main character is Mr. Incredible has immense strength that allows him to topple large objects to create bridges and use any smaller object as a projectile. This combined with his powerful attacks result in action orientated levels and puzzles. His wife, aka Elastigirl, has the ability to stretch her body into any position (very handy!) and extend her limbs to swing off certain objects. The Invincibles' children also posses super powers with the son, Dashiell able to run at great speeds and the daughter, Violet able to turn invisible and produce a force field around herself. Their levels are racing and stealth orientated respectively and provide plenty of variety.

An ‘only on Xbox' addition to The Incredibles is support for Xbox Live. The game supports Downloadable Content such as new levels and should extend the life of the game a bit. The film isn't scheduled to be released in Australian cinemas until Boxing Day so again, I would recommend not playing this game until you see the film first as it's quite unusual for a game such as this to come out so far before the film.

Waiting will serve two purposes as you won't have any story points of the film spoilt for you and you will better understand the story as the game tells it. From what little I have seen during the game, this new film from Pixar looks to be one of their best and I definitely cannot wait for it to get released.

In a recent Official Australian Xbox Magazine feature, Mark Andrews of Pixar, expressed his hopes for the game adaption to Lyle Hall, head of Heavy Iron Studios. He very simply stated...”It better not suck!” Well sorry to tell you tell you this Mark, but Lyle has let you down. The game adaptation of The Incredibles, looks a million bucks, sounds a million bucks and probably cost multi million bucks, but in this case, the high production values have not created anything particularly incredible.